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in me? And what took me to Bath?’
Adam frowned. ‘It will come back to you in time, I’m sure. If not, you can ask Justine.’ Adam gave him a searching look. ‘You have spoken to her, haven’t you?’
‘Briefly,’ Will admitted.
‘Which means that you have exchanged fewer words with her than you have with me.’
William shook his head. ‘I would rather hear your version of events first.’
‘You will find her story is much the same as mine,’ Adam said. ‘While you cannot remember her, there is no reason to assume that she will not be forthcoming if you ask these questions of her.’
Will paused, unsure of how to explain himself. Then he said, ‘It is not just that I have forgotten our marriage. I have the strangest feeling that she is not to be trusted.’
Adam stifled an oath before mastering his patience. ‘The physicians told us that you might be prone to dark moods, if you recovered at all. Do not let yourself be ruled by them.’
‘Suppose I cannot prevent it?’ he said in return. ‘You claim I will love her as I once did, given time. Suppose I do not?’
‘Then I would assume that you are not fully recovered from your injury and tell you that even more time was required.’ Adam seemed to think it was much less complicated than it seemed to him.
‘Then you must ready your advice,’ Will replied. ‘For when I look at her, I do not love her, nor can I imagine a time when I did.’
Adam sighed. ‘You always did lack imagination.’
‘Perhaps that is true. But I do not wish to develop it, simply to create a likely scenario for my previous marriage. If I cannot remember her, would an annulment not be a possibility? Surely a mental deficiency on my part...’
Adam’s eyes narrowed. ‘There is no sign that you were mentally defective when you met her. The accident happened afterwards. A declaration of mental deficiency on your part would cause other problems as well. Do you wish me to take on the management of your money and land, since you are clearly unable to make decisions for yourself? Will you seek to marry again? How will we guarantee to the next woman that she will not meet a similar fate? Unless you want to be declared my ward for the rest of your life and treated as though you cannot manage your own affairs, you had best own what wits you have.’
Will had no answer to this.
‘Far better that you should meet your wife as if she were a stranger and grow to feel for her again. I suspect the answer to it all is quite unexceptional. Standing up at the christening put you in mind to marry. You went to Bath, where you knew many young ladies were to be found, chose the most likely candidate and made your offer. Since you were so adamantly opposed to my own sudden marriage, when it happened, you would not have entered into a similar union had the bond between you not been strong.’
It sounded right. But Will still could not manage to believe it. ‘What if I was driven by some other reason?’
‘Then I would tell you, if you cannot love her, there is nothing about her that is unlikeable. She is beautiful, talented and quite devoted to you. Many marriages are built on less. You could do worse than to keep her.’ Adam was using the matter-of-fact tone he used when settling disputes amongst the tenants. It was the sort of voice that said there would be no further discussion.
So the decision was already made. He was married. His brother did not seem to care if he wanted to be. Nor could Will explain the nagging feeling, at the back of his mind, that something was very wrong with this. ‘How am I to go about growing this feeling? What advice do you have, oh, wise Bellston?’
Adam gave a confident smile. ‘I would advise that you find your wife immediately, and spend the day with her. Then you must remove yourself from my household as soon as you are able.’
‘You are turning me out?’ Will said with surprise. ‘I am barely recovered.’
‘Your own home is less than a mile from here,’ Adam said with a calming gesture. ‘The doctor is even closer to that place than he is to here. It is not that you are not welcome to visit. But the sooner you stop making excuses and isolate yourself with Justine, the sooner you will come to love her again. The pair of you must stop using the rest of us to avoid intimacy.’
‘You expect me to bed a complete stranger, hoping that I will rise in the morning with my love renewed?’
He could see by the narrowing of his brother’s eyes that Adam was nearly out of patience. ‘Perhaps the bump on the head has truly knocked all sense out of you. You talk as if it were a hardship to lie with a beautiful woman. But I meant nothing so vulgar. You must be alone with her. Talk. Share a quiet evening or two and discover what it was that drew you to her in the first place. I predict, before the week is out, you will be announcing your complete devotion to her.’
‘Very well, then. Today I will discuss the matter with her. Tomorrow, I will take her home, and make some effort to treat her as if she were a wife by my choice. But I predict we will be having the same conversation in a week’s time. Then I will expect you to offer something more substantive than empty platitudes about love.’
So he finished his breakfast and, with his brother’s words in mind, sought out Justine. But she seemed no more eager to talk to him than he was to talk to her. The servants informed him that, directly after her walk, she’d gone out with the duchess to call on the sick and needy of the village.
* * *
Penny returned without her. It seemed she had been invited to luncheon with the vicar, to celebrate the miraculous recovery of her invalid husband. That they had neglected to invite Will to the event was an oversight on their part.
* * *
By afternoon, she had returned to the house, though Will could not manage to find her. When he went to visit his nephew in the nursery, he was told that the boy was just down for a nap. Her ladyship had sung him to sleep. The nurse assured him his wife had the voice of an angel and was naturally good with children. Apparently he had chosen the perfect mother for his future brood, should he find it in his heart to make them with her.
It was hard to accuse her of dark motives when she seemed to fill her day with virtues. It explained why his family was so taken with her. But to Will, it seemed almost as if she was deliberately avoiding him. Wherever he went in the house, her ladyship had just been and gone, after doing some kindness or proving her own excellent manners.
* * *
In the end, he did not see her until supper, after they had both dressed for it on opposite sides of the connecting door. Adam was entertaining the Coltons, claiming it as a small celebration welcoming him back to health. More likely, it was an attempt to put Will on his best behaviour. Tim and Daphne were old family friends. But that did not give him the right to bark and snap at them, as he had been doing with his own family.
At least this evening he was able to manage food and drink without subtle aid from his new wife. Though he was fatigued, a single day out of bed and a few hearty meals had worked wonders on his depleted body.
As the conversation droned on about Tim’s latest experiments in his greenhouse, Will lifted his glass and looked through it, across the table at the woman he supposedly loved. Today, her gown was white muslin shot through with gold threads, her warm gold hair falling in inviting spirals from another dull white cap. But for that, she’d have looked like one of the more risqué angels in a Botticelli painting, pure but somehow a little too worldly.
She noticed his gaze and coloured sweetly, keeping her own eyes firmly focused on the food in front of her. Perhaps it was simply that he felt better today. Perhaps it was the wine. Or maybe leaving the confines of his room changed his mood. But he wondered what it was that had made him distrust her, when there was nothing exceptional in her behaviour.
She seemed shy of him, of course. But could she be blamed for it? Since the first moment he’d opened his eyes, she had shown him