Lady Olympia took the letter from him. She seemed calm, but for the faint flush along her cheekbones. She adjusted her spectacles, though they couldn’t be straighter, and opened the letter. She moved a little nearer to the window to read it, and Ripley found himself eyeing the latch, and wondering if it would offer the same difficulties as the one at Newland House . . . if she decided to make a run for it.
But why would she do that? She had nothing to run from. Ashmont was safe away in London and Uncle Fred, diabolical as he could be under the smooth surface of urbane good breeding, wasn’t proposing to take her back with him.
Well, his lordship couldn’t, could he? Aunt Julia must accompany her, or another respectable lady—or her mother. In any event, if Lady Olympia wanted to go back to London she would, and if she didn’t she wouldn’t, and none of it was up to Ripley, was it?
In that case, you could marry me.
How will you feel in a year, in five years?
Ripley was dimly aware of Lord Frederick moving to his aunt’s side, and taking a chair nearby, and murmuring something, and Aunt Julia making some sort of answer. But that was the background, and they might as well have been the paintings hanging on the wall.
All Ripley truly saw was Olympia, her head bent over the letter, adjusting her spectacles from time to time. Her hair was not falling down, exactly, but it wasn’t nearly as neat as it had been when she’d come into the library before . . . before . . . before . . .
Not so neat as before he’d kissed her and done more than he had any right to do, than was honorable to do though it was so little, not nearly enough . . .
You could marry me.
How will you feel . . .
At last Lady Olympia refolded the letter. The elders in the room must have been watching her without seeming to, because they fell silent.
She set the letter down on a table near the door.
She went out of the room.
Chapter 13
For what seemed like a lifetime, nobody said anything.
Ripley blinked, wondering if he’d dreamed what had happened. When he opened his eyes, he thought he might see Olympia reappear in his line of sight, still holding the letter, or looking up and straightening her spectacles before she spoke. But she was gone. He heard her quick footsteps retreating through the passageway leading to the Great Hall. He caught the sound of a door closing.
He started toward the doorway she’d gone out of, but Aunt Julia got in the way. The mechanical chair, not being as flexible as his body, prevented his squeezing by.
She snatched up the letter and unfolded it. “What on earth did he tell her?”
Lord Frederick moved to her, creating a larger obstacle in front of the doorway. “Only what he ought,” he said.
“Only what he ought!” Aunt Julia echoed. “And what was that, pray tell, and how much do you know of it? Was this your work?”
“Will you get out of the way?” Ripley said. “I’m not interested in the letter. I need—”
“‘You suppose my sentiments have changed,’” Aunt Julia read, “‘and you are right in that, but not in the way you assume. My feelings for you have only grown stronger, as has my dismay at the prospect of losing you.’”
“I need to—” Ripley tried again, but his aunt went on reading, and while he tried to maneuver around her and Uncle Fred, he couldn’t help hearing.
“‘—destroyed my peace and obliged me to examine my behavior, as I admit I ought to have done long ago, before asking you to take the very great step of entrusting your life to my keeping. The past few days have caused me to think, and these thoughts have ranged over my faults and misdeeds. I understood these were more than trivial, else they would not have raised doubts and fears in your mind great enough to drive you to a desperate course of action. You write harshly of yourself, but my feelings toward you are far from harsh. I can only admire your courage and daring, and beg you to forgive me for causing you to take a risk that ought not to have been necessary.’”
Not Ashmont’s style of writing but his sentiments, yes. Of this Ripley had no doubt, as he had no doubt of Uncle Fred’s turning those sentiments into something rather more articulate than Ashmont’s usual careless and all-but-incomprehensible style.
The night before the wedding . . . the things Ashmont had said about her. The soft, wondering way in which he’d said, She was kind.
But he’d said much more: about her grace and intelligence and liveliness and humor, and about her hiding her light under a bushel. How clever she was, and handsomer than others realized—as though spectacles could turn a pretty woman ugly. But it was all to the good, nobody realizing, because another fellow would have snatched her up by now.
Aunt Julia read on, and the letter grew more passionate and compelling, but Ripley, moving toward the door, barely heard above the noise in his brain, where a battle was going on between right and wrong, honor and desire, You Must Let Her Go and You Can’t Let Her Go.
He heard his aunt say, “This is monstrous unfair, sir.”
And Lord Frederick said, “To whom?”
That was the last Ripley heard as he wheeled himself through the passage and into the Great Hall, where he snapped at the footman Tom, who hastily opened the door for him.
“Which way did she go?” Ripley said.
Tom pointed. “Down the path to the right, Your Grace.”
The path was gravel, not the easiest surface to negotiate in a mechanical chair, as Ripley had discovered earlier. But if his grandmother could do it, he could. This awareness made the experience no less frustrating. On foot—on two good feet, that is—he might have caught up with Olympia easily, though at the moment he couldn’t see her. Still, she couldn’t have gone far in the few minutes he’d been delayed.
He went on, and came to another set of pathways, these simply packed dirt. He spotted one of the gardeners not far away and called to him.
The man, one of the older staff—Hill, was his name—hurried to him, cap in hand. “Your Grace.”
“The lady, Hill,” Ripley said. “Which way did she go?”
Hill scratched his head and looked about him, frowning. “Hard to say exactly, Your Grace, but she looked to be going southward, toward the river.”
Ripley wheeled himself along the garden path, through twists and turns among plantings and statuary that reduced his view of his surroundings to what lay directly ahead, and then only a small distance ahead. At times, the world opened up, but it was a while before he finally spied her, a tiny figure in the distance.
As he left the large, formal gardens, the relatively flat landscape about the house’s immediate environs gave way to the park’s gently sloping ground. He caught a glimpse of her, moving in the direction of the fishing house where he and his friends and sister had spent so much of their time in years past.
Ripley made slow progress. Though he traveled slightly downhill now, the ground was rougher and more overgrown. Meanwhile, the bushes and trees along the twists and turns of the path blocked his view. Now and again he caught a glimpse of Olympia, not so tiny a figure as before, and he remembered the day in the Newlands’ garden—was it only a few days ago?—when he’d followed the flashes of white through the shrubbery. Now it seemed to him as though he’d been chasing her for all his life.
He should have chased her before, years before. He’d known she was there, among the wallflowers and hens and feeble old men. He’d never wondered why. He’d taken it for granted she’d always be there. He’d never given it any thought. Had he somehow assumed it was for his convenience? Had he assumed she waited, like some lady in her castle, for him to come riding up, like the knight in a romance, to take her away? When he was good and ready?
“Thinking,” Ripley muttered. “Stop it.”
The vista opened up a moment later, and he saw her, closer now, within hailing distance. “Olympia!” he shouted.
She gave a start and turned.
“Go away!” she cried, and marched on, at n
o slow pace. He bumped along, twice into trees. The day, which had dawned relatively fair, had grown cloudy, and the warmth had become oppressive. His sweating hands slipped on the handles, causing the chair to veer off the path.
“Dammit, Olympia!”
“Go away!”
“I need to talk to you!”
“No!”
She stormed on.
He struggled with the chair, which more and more objected to the terrain, the wheels not cooperating fully with the winches and rolling him into bushes. He bumped against small rocks, and the slope, gentle as it was, still drew him down faster while he fought to stay on the path.
She kept on, and it ought to have been easy enough to follow, but the path grew rougher still. Trees and shrubbery, which hadn’t been cut back, apparently, for the past year or more, encroached. Apparently nobody had bothered, either, with clearing away the various pebbles and nuts and other debris that had rolled or washed into it.
Though the chair supposedly worked smoothly in any terrain, it hadn’t been designed for wilderness travels. Ripley was trying to steer it while preventing its yielding to gravity and rolling headlong down to the river. To do this, he needed three hands. Having only the usual pair, he had his left hand on one winch and had to manage the right side with his right elbow while his right hand remained on the rod that stopped the wheels, which wasn’t working as well as it might.
He was only about twenty yards behind his quarry when his cramped, sweating hand slipped from the brake handle. Before he could regain control, the chair rolled forward. He turned a handle to one side, to go off the path, where the undergrowth would slow him, but the chair bumped on a rock. The right handle came off in his hand, the chair wobbled sideways briefly, then bowled down the path, straight toward the water.
He looked at the useless handle in his hand.
He threw it aside.
He let go of the other handle.
He heard Olympia scream.
Horrified, Olympia watched the chair bump down to the path alongside the river then across it and over the riverbank, into the water. There it struck something, with a jolt hard enough to make Ripley’s head snap back. The chair tipped over on its side.
She ran back the way she’d come and down into the water. It was shallow, but rocky. She splashed to where the chair lay.
A dark, dripping head came up. Ripley looked up at her and laughed.
Her heart, which seemed to have stopped altogether, sprang back into action so quickly it made her dizzy, and hot and cold at the same time.
She’d thought . . . she’d thought . . .
But no, there he was, the great blockhead, laughing. All in one piece. No blood. Not dead. She wanted to kill him.
“You reckless man!” she cried. “You could have broken your neck.”
“You’re wet,” he said.
There was a low rumble in the distance. He tipped his head back and gazed at the sky. “And about to get wetter.”
She looked up. The previously blue sky was swiftly shrinking behind the grey clouds massing above their heads. She heard another rumble, louder and nearer.
She grabbed the chair and turned it upright. Her hands shook. “Get up!” she said. “Get up!”
Using the chair for support, he hauled himself upright.
She was already wet. Getting wetter didn’t worry her. But she didn’t fancy standing in the open while a thunderstorm bore down on them.
“Sit,” she said.
“It’s broken, and you can’t push me uphill in it, even this mild uphill,” he said. “Not that I’m eager to get on that thing again. Look where it took me. There I was, minding my own business, when it decided it wanted a swim.”
“You let go! I saw you!”
“I was tired of fighting with it.”
“You could have broken your neck, your thick skull!” She wished she didn’t care what happened to him. She wished somebody, anybody else had followed her out of Newland House the other day—was it only three days?—and brought her back, before she could become infatuated with the wrong man.
“I didn’t remember how rocky the riverbed is here,” the Wrong Man said. “Farther downriver the bottom’s smoother.”
She was well aware of the rocky river bottom here. She didn’t want to think about what might have happened. She wanted to be out of this river, where he’d nearly killed himself.
“Never mind.” The rumbling grew louder. The churning clouds darkened the world about them. “We have to get back.” She tried to push the chair up the riverbank, a job that turned out to be harder than it looked.
“What are you doing?” he said. “Leave it.”
She kept pushing. She needed to fight something. It might as well be this curst piece of furniture.
He let out a sigh and joined her, each taking one corner of the chair’s back. She hoped he was using it to support his bad ankle. Then she told herself he wasn’t hers to worry about. He wasn’t her problem. She had problems enough. She was going to have to teach herself to love another man because that man still wanted her, and she was a practical and sensible girl, and marrying him was the practical and sensible thing to do.
“The fishing house is around the next curve,” he said, nodding that way. “Level ground, not uphill, and much nearer than the house.”
She looked in the direction he’d indicated, then upward, in the direction she’d come from. She wasn’t sure where the house was. She had no idea how far she’d walked, blindly, through the park. Ashmont’s words had pained her, deeply, even though she knew those weren’t his precise words. The letter sounded generally like him, though, and she’d wanted to run. Not that she had any idea where to run to. Not that she was at all clear about what she wanted to run from or saw, really, any point to running. If only she hadn’t run in the first place.
She couldn’t think about that now. The darkness was deepening while the thunder rolled toward them. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash.
She didn’t argue when Ripley turned the chair in the direction of the fishing house.
Ripley told her to run ahead, and he’d follow with the chair, but she wouldn’t cooperate. If she left him to push the chair on his own, he would put too much weight on his bad foot, she said.
Luckily they had only a short distance to go. The fishing house had stood near the turn in the river for a hundred fifty years. At any rate, he hoped it still stood.
The storm steadily bore down on them, and as they reached the bend, lightning blasted the sky. Thunder followed rather too close in its wake. Raindrops plopped on the pathway, on the chair, on their heads.
He pushed the chair faster, ignoring the jolts up his leg when his right foot landed hard on an unexpected lump in the pathway. The grounds hereabouts needed attention, he thought, then pushed the thought aside for another time.
The landscape lay in deepening shadow. Thunder rolled while lightning flashed among the clouds.
As soon as they turned the bend, the house came into view.
In most people’s opinion, it wasn’t much of a fishing house. It looked nothing like the grand, multichambered and multistoried Classical, Gothic, and Chinese fishing temples of so many other great estates. This was merely a square stone structure, with a few temple-like architectural touches. An ancestor had built it sometime in the late 1600s. Unenlarged and unembellished since, it boasted a single room lit by windows on all four sides. A set of three shallow steps led to a narrow portico that sheltered the double doors.
As they hurried toward it, a blast of lightning lit the building. A moment later, thunder rolled over them.
Ripley left the chair at the bottom of the stairs and limped up the steps behind Olympia. As they reached the portico, the rain picked up its pace. He pulled the door handles. The doors didn’t budge. Locked. Of course they would be.
“Never mind,” she said. “We’re sheltered from the worst of it, and very likely it’ll pass through quickly.”
; “Don’t think so,” he said, glancing about him. “Doesn’t look like that kind of storm. This one looks like it means to stay.”
He left her and began limping round the side of the house, testing windows.
“Ripley!”
At the back, he found one with a broken latch.
“Found a way in,” he called back. “Stay where you are.”
He wrestled the window open, then went back to get the chair.
“You’re going to stand on the chair while I hold it, and climb in through the window and unlock the door from the inside,” he said.
He could think of a score of other women who’d look at him as though he was mad.
Olympia nodded.
She helped push the chair into place, and he let her, though he didn’t need help. When he took hold of it, keeping it steady, she quickly climbed onto it then through the window in a flurry of skirts and petticoats and writhing limbs and a whirl of familiar scent. Though she wore his aunt’s clothes, the scent he caught was of Olympia’s skin and hair.
He remembered her climbing over the wall at the back of Newland House’s garden. He remembered her dress and petticoats swirling about his face . . .
He shook off the recollection and moved back to the door and waited. And waited. The great drops of rain fell faster. Wind gusted.
“Do you mean to open the door?” he called. “Or were you wanting me to beat back the lightning with the chair?”
“It’s dark,” she called back. “I can’t find the—oh, here it is.”
The door opened, and Ripley dashed in.
“The chair,” she said. “You left it—”
“Bother the chair.” He looked about him. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw the tinderbox on the mantel, alongside the simple utensils the family always kept here: cooking pots, a few plates and cups, a pitcher and bowl. The table held a small basket of table linens. Wood had been stacked near the fireplace.
He made a fire. It gave him something to do while he tried to decide what to do. Or, more important, what to say.
A Duke in Shining Armor Page 22