by Balogh, Mary
“There is a floral clock through there,” Adrian Sawyer told them, pointing to a high privet hedge to his right, “and an impressive fountain. And there is the rose arbor up beside the house. Someone told me there are a thousand blooms there, but I did not stop to count.”
The sisters thought that deserved another burst of glee.
“The air is cooler out on the river,” Lady Jessica said. “Enjoy the boats.”
The four of them went on their way, chatting and laughing.
“They were mute when I met them earlier with their mother and eldest sister,” Gabriel said. “Giggling, but otherwise mute.”
“Doubtless they were intimidated by your solemn grandeur,” Lady Jessica said. “And your advanced age.”
“Do you think?” he asked.
“I think,” she said.
“I suppose,” he said, “I ought to have realized that if the hothouses were recommended to me, they would be recommended to multitudes of others too. Shall we forget about them? Go to the rose arbor instead?”
“To see a thousand roses?” she said. “By all means. It will make a change from gazing upon a single one.”
“Are you offended by those?” he asked her.
She turned her head to look at him again. Her parasol made a lacy pattern of sunshine and shade across her face beneath the brim of her bonnet. She was very beautiful. It was not an original observation, but her good looks were a constant source of wonder to him.
“No.” She hesitated. “Quite the contrary.”
Crowds seemed to be gathering on the terrace and the reason became obvious as they drew closer. Tea was being set out on long tables covered with white cloths, and it did indeed look like the veritable feast Lady Vickers had predicted. Servants were setting up small tables and chairs on what was left of the terrace and on the lawn below.
“Are you hungry?” Gabriel asked.
“I would rather go to the rose arbor,” she said.
Interesting. She might have lost him easily enough among the crowds gathering about the food tables—if she wished to do so, that was. Apparently she did not.
He expected that the rose arbor would be crowded too, and probably it had been until a short while ago. Now there was only one group of people on the lower tier, deep in animated conversation. The second and top tiers appeared to be deserted. Tea had been deemed of more interest than roses.
It was an impressive part of the garden, running along the whole width of the house as it did. There were trellises, archways, hedges, flower beds, low walls, the wall of the house itself, all of them loaded with roses at various stages of blooming. A high hedge, cut with geometric precision, extended all the way down the side of the arbor farthest from the house, giving the impression of deep seclusion and the reality of breathtaking beauty. Even the sounds of voices and laughter seemed muted here.
“I think,” Lady Jessica said, “this is what heaven must smell like.” She closed her eyes and inhaled slowly.
“We will have to be very virtuous for the rest of our lives, then,” he said, “so that we may enjoy it together for eternity.”
“Which might be an embarrassment,” she said, opening her eyes, “if I should end up with a different husband and you with a different wife.”
“Impossible,” he said.
“Do you always get your own way, Mr. Thorne?” she asked, cupping a yellow rose in both hands, though she was not quite touching it, he noticed.
“Only in the important things,” he said.
“And I am important?”
“Yes.”
She looked around until she saw a wrought iron seat close to the wall of the house, with its climbing rose plants, and went to sit on it. She left room for him beside her. The floor of this top tier was paved with pinkish brick. There was a small fountain in the middle, its granite basin shaped like a fully opened rose.
“Is Thorne your real name?” she asked him.
Ah.
“Yes,” he said.
“Not Rochford?” she asked.
“No.”
She closed her parasol and set it down on the seat beside her. “I believe you are lying,” she said.
“You think I am the long-lost earl, then?” he asked her. “Just because I share a first name with him?”
She looked up at him as he stood by the fountain, his hands clasped at his back, and her eyes roamed over him. “Are you?” she asked, her voice so soft it was hardly audible.
He gazed back. Secrecy had not been his original plan when he decided to come to London rather than go direct to Brierley. He had merely wanted to be better prepared to go there. He had wanted to look like an English gentleman for starters. He had wanted to hire a good lawyer and agent and acquire an experienced, reliable steward. He had wanted to find out what he needed to do to verify his identity and establish his claim. He had wanted, perhaps, to find out if there might be any trouble awaiting him—legal trouble, that was—though he did not believe there would be anything he could not handle. He was no longer the frightened boy who had fled England thirteen years ago. Too many details were circumstantial at best, and he had a decent though not infallible alibi. But there might be some sort of trouble facing him anyway, in the form of resentment, even outright hostility, from the people living in the vicinity of Brierley. He had always had a decent relationship with almost everyone, but things might have changed at the end and been perpetuated by his absence. He had felt it wise to find out what he could before he went there so that he would know exactly what he was facing. Mary could not be expected to know everything. She lived the life of a near hermit.
He had not intended any great secrecy, then. If he had, he would surely have changed his first name, which, though not unique, was not common either. He wondered if Lady Jessica was the only one who had guessed the truth. Several other people, including Anthony Rochford himself, had heard him own to the name Gabriel last evening.
But he had been asked a question. And a lie was pointless. Lies usually were.
“Thorne was my mother’s name,” he told her, “and that of her cousin in Boston. He officially adopted me as his son after I had lived there and worked for him for six years. His wife was dead and he had no children of his own. My name was legally changed, with my full consent. I had used it when I took passage to America, and I had used it there. I would rather be a Thorne than a Rochford, though I do regret any disrespect that shows to my father, who was a decent man.”
“You are the Earl of Lyndale,” she said. She appeared to be speaking more to herself than to him.
“Regrettably,” he said.
“Why do you regret it?” She frowned.
“I was happy in America,” he said. “I was never happy at Brierley.”
“Why have you returned, then?” she asked him. “Why have you not just let everyone continue to assume you are dead? Or perhaps you still intend to do so. Perhaps you have come here to amuse yourself before returning to the life that makes you happy. But no, that cannot be your intention. Why would you hope to marry me if you intended to resume your life as Mr. Thorne, wealthy businessman from Boston? Your wishing to marry me makes sense only if you intend to be the Earl of Lyndale.”
He moved closer to her and stood looking down at her for a while before setting one booted foot against the edge of the seat beside her and resting one forearm across his thigh. “Why have I returned?” he said. “And why have I decided to stay? Call it duty, if you will, to those who work—or worked—at the house and on the estate.”
“Have you known all this time that your uncle and cousin were dead?” she asked him.
“For most of the time, yes,” he said. “Letters are slow in crossing the Atlantic, especially in winter.”
“So why now?” she asked him. “Just for the sheer satanic pleasure of raising hope in the man who believes he is about to become the earl and owner of Brierley and any fortune that goes with it? And in his son? And then of dashing those hopes at the last possibl
e moment?”
“There is one person at Brierley,” he said, “who is and always has been very dear to me. She lives in a small cottage in the park that surrounds the house. She has been threatened with eviction when the new earl comes into his inheritance. He plans to have a lake created out of the land around her cottage. He plans to use the house itself as a picturesque sort of folly on an island in the middle of it. She has nothing beyond the cottage itself and the small allowance my uncle made her. That has already been stopped, though there is no one at Brierley with any legal right to have made that decision. She is about to be destitute, with no way of providing for herself. It is for Mary I returned, Lady Jessica.”
She was gazing up at him, her eyes wide, her lips slightly parted.
“She is my late aunt’s sister,” he told her. “She was born with a deformed back and foot and hand. She takes in stray cats and dogs and any troubled wild creatures that come her way. The gardeners occasionally bring her wounded birds and she mends their wings and sets them free. She has a garden that rivals this in beauty.” He gestured at the arbor around them. “I have never known anyone so contented with her life or anyone so . . . good. I love her. Not in that way. I honor and love her and would die for her.”
Good God. Where were such words coming from? He felt suddenly foolish. But Mary deserved to be honored.
“But as it happened,” she said, “you were not called upon to die for her but simply to come home. To give up everything you held dear for her sake. A sort of death in itself.”
“For the only time since I have known her,” he said, “she asked something of me. She asked me to come. And here I am.”
He was astounded suddenly when her eyes, still riveted on his face, grew bright with unshed tears. She caught her upper lip between her teeth.
“I would rather keep my anonymity for a short while longer,” he said. “I would like to gather a little more information than I already have. Mary, it seems, is not the only one who has been made to suffer. I blame myself for not having realized the danger of that before I came here—or perhaps of refusing to consider the possibility of it. I am indeed no angel, despite my name. I believe too I would like to meet my cousin again before divulging the truth. The one who is about to be earl.”
She released her lip. “Why has Mr. Anthony Rochford not recognized you?” she asked him.
“He has never seen me before now,” he said. “He was just a young boy when I went to America. Whenever his mother and father came to Brierley, which happened quite frequently, he was left at home.”
He watched her draw a slow breath. “I will not give away your secret,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She looked down at her hands spread on her lap for a few moments and then at the fountain and then back at him. He held her eyes with his own.
“I would have to be a dreadful slowtop to waste an opportunity for a little romance in such idyllic surroundings,” he said.
He gave her time to turn her head away or get to her feet and suggest they go for tea on the terrace. She did neither. She licked her lips in what was surely not meant to be a provocative gesture, though it brought his eyes to her mouth. He moved his own closer and raised his eyes to hers again. She gazed back.
And he kissed her.
It was a mere touching of lips. A lingering touch. He had sensed from the moment she had demanded that he romance her if he wanted a chance with her that she would scorn any aggressive moves to take her heart by storm. Her heart was not easily taken, he had judged. Hence the single rose sent to her each morning and the music he had played for her last evening and the duet. And the touch of his little finger to hers, though there had been nothing deliberate or planned about that.
And hence this kiss, which was hardly a kiss at all except that it did things to his body and his heartbeat and his mind that far more lascivious embraces with other women had never done. It moved him somehow into a physical space that was neither his nor hers but something else without a name. It was shockingly, inexplicably intimate.
And he wanted more. By God, he wanted more.
He did not take more, except that he set his fingertips against her jaw, and when he drew back his head and gazed into her eyes again, he ran his thumb lightly over her slightly parted lips.
She smiled fleetingly and moved her own head back.
“You have a strange idea of romance, Mr. Thorne,” she said. But she did not say what she meant by that and he did not ask.
“If we do not go for tea soon,” he said, “the food will be carried back indoors and we will go hungry.”
“That would be a ghastly fate,” she said. “Let us go by all means. I daresay my mother is wondering where I am.”
“Especially if she has seen Rochford and you are not with him,” he said. “I gather your family is trying to promote a match between the two of you?”
“Just as they are trying to promote one between you and Estelle,” she said. “Being a member of the Westcott family can be a severe trial. And a great joy. Frequently frustrating and endlessly entertaining.”
“I look forward to becoming a part of it,” he told her, removing his fingertips from her jaw and returning his foot to the ground.
“And there you go again,” she said. “Making assumptions.” But she did not sound annoyed with him this time.
Twelve
Mr. Rochford was expected at Archer House. He had begged for the honor, and it had been granted. Jessica was wearing one of her new dresses, a sprigged muslin she thought would be more suited to a garden party like the one she had attended the day before yesterday. But her mother had suggested it for today. Her mother had also come to her dressing room in person to suggest that Ruth dress her hair in its usual upswept style, but a little fussier than usual for the daytime, with perhaps a few curled tendrils to trail over her ears and along her neck. Ruth had done a perfect job of it, as usual.
Anna had gone with Cousin Elizabeth and all their children except Beatrice to visit Wren and her children. Jessica was sitting in the drawing room with her mother when they heard Mr. Rochford arrive. But she did not listen for footsteps on the stairs. He was not coming to call upon her. Not yet. He had asked to wait upon Avery.
Last evening at a literary evening Jessica had attended because it was given by one of her friends, Mr. Rochford had seated himself beside her for the first reading and refused to be dislodged afterward. It was customary at such events to circulate, to move about the room between each reading of a poem or story, discussing its merits and conversing upon other literary topics with one’s fellow guests. Mr. Rochford had followed Jessica wherever she went and had seated himself beside her whenever she settled for another performance, even though she chose a different chair each time.
She had found it irritating and did not doubt it had been observed and commented upon. She had also felt a bit sorry for him, for she knew that what was facing him was going to be a disappointment of colossal proportions. But then he was a liar. He had pretended he had known Gabriel Rochford as a boy when he had not. And if he had lied about that, could he be trusted on any details of the story he had told?
This morning Mr. Rochford had sent a formal written request that the Duke of Netherby grant him half an hour of his invaluable time at two o’clock in the afternoon.
“He is very handsome, Jessica,” her mother said now. “And personable. And charming.”
“Yes,” Jessica agreed. “He is all three, Mama.”
“And eligible,” her mother added.
“Yes.” It was hard sometimes to hang on to a secret.
“And young,” her mother said.
Four other gentlemen had reached the point of calling formally upon Avery in the past six years or so. The last one had been close to fifty years old—older than her mother. Avery had observed in that aloof, bored way of his after she had refused him that if she had accepted, he would have locked her in her room and fed her bread and water until her wedding day.
“Yes,” she said now. “He is probably about my age. Maybe even a little younger.”
“You are twenty-five years old, Jessica,” her mother said. She sounded a bit despairing. “This would be a very good match for you even though it may be years before Mr. Rochford succeeds to his father’s title. You could be happy. Surely.”
“We do not even know for certain that an offer is about to be made, Mama,” Jessica said.
“Oh, come now.” Her mother laughed. “Are you nervous, Jessica? Do you like him?”
“I do not dislike him,” Jessica said, and hoped she was not lying outright. It would be unfair to hate him. He was trying very hard. If he lacked something in town bronze, it was understandable. This was his first visit to London, after all. It was his first taste of life lived in the bosom of the ton. He was doing his best. And he would surely learn. But . . . he was a liar. And it had been such an unnecessary lie if he believed, as he no doubt did, that his cousin was dead.
“I hope,” her mother said, “you are not dangling after Mr. Thorne, Jessica.”
Dangling after? She had never openly flirted with anyone in her life.
“I am not,” she said. But she thought of today’s pink rose in its narrow crystal vase upstairs beside her bed and of yesterday’s—yellow, probably as an echo of the dress she had worn to the garden party or of the rose she had cupped in her hands in the rose arbor. And of all the others, in varying shades of pink, pressed so that they would not turn brown about the edges and wither and die. And she thought of that kiss, which only afterward had she realized was not remotely lascivious, though every part of her body, from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes, had melted with the sheer sensual intimacy of it. “I am not dangling after anyone, Mama, and can safely promise never to do so.”
“It was the wrong word,” her mother admitted with a sigh. “Of course you are not. There is no need. I can think of a dozen men without even taxing my brain who would fall to their knees with one glance of encouragement from you. But do you . . . favor Mr. Thorne?”