The Ravishing of Lady Mary Ware Read Free

marriages were at an end, Roger said:
    â€˜For me this means that I no longer have to go into hiding from the French; but for you, my sweet, it makes only the difference that I can escort you openly to Pressburg, so be certain of getting you there safely and more swiftly. The good offices of your dear friend John remain the best method of conveying you back to England.’
    Georgina nodded, her dark curls stirring slightly on either side of her rosy cheeks. ‘I think you right; though I regret that our parting should now be the sooner. I had looked forward to our making a long, circuitous journey together, with a spice of danger and many joyous nights spent at wayside inns. But what of yourself? Now thatyou no longer have anything to fear, do you intend to rejoin the Emperor?’
    â€˜That depends on yourself,’ he replied, his bright blue eyes holding hers intently. ‘Do you at long last agree to marry me, wild horses will not stop me from joining you in England with all speed imaginable.’
    â€˜Oh, Roger!’ she protested. ‘We have talked of this so often through the years, and always reached the same conclusion. Our joy in sleeping together has never lessened since we first became lovers as boy and girl. But solely because fate decreed that we could share a bed only for brief periods, at long intervals. You have ever been the dearest person in my life, and so will ever remain; but had we married, our mutual passion would long since have waned, and we’d be no more than a humdrum couple approaching middle age.’
    â€˜Ah, but that is just the point! I grant you that with our virile natures and lust for life, had we married when young we might, after a few years, have become satiated with each other and sought pastures new, or thwarted our instincts and settled into a dreary, joyless domesticity. But we are older now. Both of us have sown our wild oats, and far more abundantly than most. To my daughter, Susan, you have for many years played the part of a sweet and devoted mother. But your boy, Charles, needs a father to bring him up, and who better than myself? ’Tis time that we put casual lechery behind us and entered on the quieter joys of life.’
    For a long time Georgina was silent, then she said, ‘You are right that Charles needs a father. How wrong I was to imagine that brute, Ulrich, would fill the role. And no-one could make a proper man of Charles more surely than yourself. I agree, too, that I have had my fill of lovers. How lucky I’ve been in that: a score or more of men, all handsome and distinguished. But now I feel the time has come when I could be a faithful wife. I make nopromise, Roger dear; but before we part at Pressburg I’ll think seriously on it.’
    â€˜Bless you for that, my love,’ he smiled, as he refilled her glass with the golden wine.
    When she had drunk, she asked, ‘Should I decide against letting you make an honest woman of me—what then?’
    He shrugged. ‘I hardly know. I’ve been monstrous fortunate in that, during seventeen years of war, I have had many narrow escapes from death. But, on the law of averages, such luck cannot last indefinitely, and I’m much averse to throwing my life away on yet another of the Emperor’s battlefields. On the other hand, I am much tempted to stay on with him, so that I may witness the final act of the drama he has brought upon the world.’
    â€˜Meseems then that, should you survive, by the time you come tottering home the grey hair above your ears that now gives you such a dashing look will have spread to cover your whole head. England will never make peace with Bonaparte, and he is now more powerful than ever before.’
    â€˜Most people suppose so. And with some reason, as his word is now law from southern Italy to the Baltic Sea and, except for severely wounded Austria, from the Atlantic coast to the borders of Turkey. Russia alone on the