Whispers of Heaven

by Candice Proctor

  Harrison let out his breath in a quiet sigh of relief. But he kept his watch in his hand a moment longer, to let Philippa know he was displeased with her.

  "Don't glower at me, Harrison," Philippa said, tucking her parasol under her arm so that she could draw on her fine kid gloves. "We're not late, and you know it."

  "I never glower."

  "Of course not. You would never do anything so ill bred as to glower. You simply draw your eyebrows together and look down your long nose at the malefactor in question, like a be- wigged judge on a high bench about to order another execution at dawn."

  He opened the carriage door for her himself. "How do you know what a high court judge looks like?"

  "I don't." She took his hand and smiled at him as he helped her into the carriage, although her lips remained reposed in a solemn, serene line. She had a way of smiling with only her eyes that most people missed. In fact, Harrison often suspected that there was a great deal about Philippa that most people missed. He was her only brother, yet even he sometimes had the uncomfortable suspicion that he didn't know her at all. That the calm, demure, and biddable face she showed the world was as carefully contrived as the facade of his house—elegant, artificial, and utterly for effect.

  "How many times did you change your dress?" he asked, climbing in beside her.

  "Only twice." She opened her parasol and held it at just the right angle to protect her delicate complexion. Unlike Jesmond, Philippa knew better than to expose her pale, perfect skin to the Australian sun.

  "Warrick might not even be there, you know."

  The parasol dipped slightly, as if the hand holding it went slack for a moment, then tightened. "Of course he'll be there," she said, her voice serene, any possible emotion in her light brown eyes hidden by lowered lashes. "It's Jessie's first night home."

  Harrison leaned back in his seat, the carriage jerking forward as the coachman gave the horses the office to start. "Well, if he's not, it'll be his loss, for he'll miss seeing how beautiful you look."

  She rewarded him with a radiant smile that lit up her entire face. She did look unusually pretty tonight, Harrison thought, her full cheeks flushed with color, her light brown hair worn in clusters of curls falling fashionably from a center part, with the back looped up.

  She had been promised since birth to the heir of Castle Corbett, and although the specific identity of that heir had changed over the years as first one brother, then the next died, Philippa's general destiny had never altered. If the death of either Cecil or Reid Corbett had caused her any distress beyond the sorrow to be expected at the premature death of a friend, she'd never shown it. She had accepted Warrick as her future spouse with the same equanimity she had shown toward first Cecil, then Reid.

  But Warrick, Harrison knew, was not so sanguine about receiving his late brothers' betrothed along with the rest of the family inheritance. He was to have formally asked for Philippa's hand in marriage when she turned eighteen. Yet Philippa's eighteenth birthday had come and gone several months ago, and Warrick hadn't said a word.

  It was an unfortunate thought, for it reminded Harrison that, while Jesmond had accepted his own proposal more than two years ago now, he had not yet succeeded in making her his wife. Instead, she had insisted on sailing off to attend that ridiculous school of hers. Sometimes, he found himself wondering uneasily what kind of an effect her studies and her time away might have had on her. He was sure of her, of course. He had always been sure of her. She wasn't deliberately, provocatively wild or rebellious, like Warrick. But she did have a streak of unpredictability, of almost accidental nonconformity, that caused him no small amount of concern whenever he was honest enough with himself to admit it.

  "You're gripping that walking stick as if you'd like to strangle it," Philippa said, the carriage bumping and swaying as it turned out of the drive and onto the main track. "You've been laboring under such a torment of anxiety and impatience these last few days, I'll never understand why you didn't simply go with Warrick to Blackhaven Bay and meet Jessie when she came in."

  Harrison glanced at his sister, then swung his face away quickly, his gaze carefully fixed on the rolling green pasture- land, his cheeks heating with a rare betrayal of discomfort. A part of him had wanted desperately to be there this morning, to catch that first, longed-for glimpse of the woman he loved, to touch his fingertips to her soft cheeks, to see her lips part in a welcome smile. And yet he'd been secretly relieved when Beatrice Corbett had gently suggested he come to supper this evening instead. Because the truth was, there existed a dangerously ungenteel, almost animalistic undercurrent to his feelings for Jesmond. On a windswept beach, with the sun hot on his skin and the pounding surge of the waves crashing around them, he could well have forgotten himself and allowed his passion for her to overwhelm him in a way that might frighten her, and would certainly publicly embarrass him. Amongst the cold marble and stiff brocade of the Cor- betts' punctiliously correct drawing room, he would be in no danger.

  "Really, Philippa." He let his voice sharpen with a quick spurt of irritation. "Jesmond has just traveled half the way around the world. I would expect you of all people to understand her mother's desire to allow her some time to recover."

  Philippa laughed softly. "I would likely need half a year, at least, to recover from such a journey. But not Jessie. When did you ever know Jessie to need to rest after anything?"

  The carriage was already slowing for the turn into the tree- lined avenue leading to the castle. They could easily have walked the distance between the two houses—had often done it, in fact, as children. But they were no longer children. Besides, one did not arrive in response to a formal dinner invitation on foot.

  Harrison gave his sister an indulgent smile. "Jesmond is a grown woman now, Philippa. You can hardly expect her to be the same, rather unorthodox adolescent you remember, forever scrambling up cliff faces looking for fossils and risking her neck stumbling about in caves."

  Philippa shook her head. "She'll never change."

  "Of course she'll change." Harrison felt his breath quicken in anticipation as the carriage drew up before the castle's tower-topped porch. "Those sorts of activities might be acceptable for a young girl, but they're hardly suited to the wife of a man in my position."

  Philippa paused in the midst of gathering shawl, parasol, and handbag, and looked up at him, a frown drawing an unusual tiny line between her brows. "If Beatrice Corbett couldn't stop her all these years, what makes you think you can?"

  He tightened his grip on his walking stick to step lightly from the carriage, and laughed. "Don't worry. Jesmond might have unusual interests, but she's been well brought up. She knows what's expected of a woman of her station." He waited, correctly, while the groom assisted his sister to alight. Then he offered her his arm and turned, his eagerness carefully concealed, as he prepared to be announced to the

  woman who would be his wife.

  * * *

  Jessie was halfway through the side garden when she heard the jingle of harness and rattle of carriage wheels on the drive.

  "Oh, Lord," she groaned beneath her breath. Picking up her skirts, she ran across the rose-edged lawn and reached the open archway in the creeper-clad stone wall that separated the garden from the drive in time to see a tall, thin gentleman in a curly brimmed top hat and elegant dress coat offer his arm to a smaller, less angular woman with light brown curls and a lace parasol, who looked up and said, "Jessie."

  The last rays of the setting sun cast a slanting, golden light through the park to shimmer over the taffeta of Philippa's gown and emphasize the expensive frill of Harrison's fine shirt front as the carriage moved off toward the stableyard with a dignified clip-clop of hooves. Jessie hadn't seen brother or sister for over two years, but they were her dear friends and the intimate familiarity of the scene, the tightness of it, filled her with a warm glow of contentment that helped to dissipate the unsettling range of emotions of the past half hour or so. She was home, where she ha
d longed to be, with the people she had missed so much, and she was happy.

  Quickly smoothing her grass-stained skirt over her full petticoats, she started forward with a laugh of sheer pleasure and held out her hands. "You've caught me late dressing for dinner. One might think I haven't changed a bit since I was a child."

  It was Philippa who reached her first, laughing as she enfolded Jessie in a tight embrace. "Oh, I hope you haven't changed, Jessie. It's so good to have you home."

  Leaning back, Jessie held her friend at arm's length and looked at her. Although she'd been only sixteen when Jessie left, the last two years seemed to have altered Philippa little. Of the four of them—Philippa, Jessie, Warrick, and Harrison— Philippa had always been the quiet one, her humor so low-key and unobtrusive her brother often missed it entirely. She had a kind of calm serenity, a strangely mature, unexpectedly wise acceptance of the vagaries of life that had always eluded Jessie, and she suspected always would.

  "It's good to be home," said Jessie. "I can't tell you how good."

  "Welcome, Jesmond," said Harrison, stepping forward to take her hands in his and smile down at her with his fine, English gray eyes.

  He was tall, taller even than Warrick, and thinner, with a lanky, loose-limbed, long-boned frame that he carried with the pride and self-assurance bred into him by generations of affluence and authority. She smiled up into his aristocratically handsome face, with its high-bridged nose, neat mustache, and swooping sidewhiskers, and for one spinning moment, she felt as if she had never left.

  He had always called her Jesmond, even when they were children. He was the only one besides her mother who did so, and she'd asked him why, once—why he never called her Jessie the way the others did. It had been years ago, on a gloriously warm, sun-filled day when they were all down on the shingle beach of Blackhaven Bay, in the summer, the summer before Cecil died. Harrison had waded through the surf to stand beside her, and he'd looked down at her, for he'd already been tall then, thirteen years old to her nine.

  "Jessie isn't a girl's name," he'd said in that serious, confident way he had. "It's a boy's name. And you act enough like a boy already without me encouraging you."

  "I don't," she'd said, laying her palms flat against his chest and pushing hard enough to send him staggering backward through the foaming waves, despite his height and his extra years.

  "Don't you?" he'd said, a triumphant smile curling his lips. "Girls don't push. And they don't argue."

  That hadn't stopped her from arguing, of course. But she hadn't been able to change his mind. He still called her Jesmond, and she knew he always would.

  "Harrison," she said now, smiling at the memory. "How can it be forever, when you haven't changed at all? When you still insist upon calling me Jesmond?"

  He laughed, and she thought he might take her in his arms, the way his sister had done, but he didn't. His grip on her fingers was tight, though; very tight. And his face when he looked down at her was unexpectedly strained and serious. She thought for one wild moment that he meant to kiss her, and she knew a sudden, unexpected moment of shyness. Then he let her go and stepped back, as if he, too, felt the need to put some space between them, and she wondered at herself.

  "You've been visiting your father's grave," he said now, looking beyond her in the direction from which she had come. "I can't tell you how sorry I am."

  "Thank you," she said quickly, her throat threatening to close with an upsurge of emotion. She knew he meant it, but she still wished he hadn't said it. She wasn't ready yet to speak of her father's death. At least, not with Harrison. She always felt she needed to be strong around him, to hide the vulnerable, needy parts of her soul, to be as calm and controlled as he was.

  She went away soon after that, to dress quickly for dinner, while Beatrice greeted their guests and led them into the large, ornately plastered drawing room, with its white marble fireplace and peach damask-covered settees and French walnut furniture. By the time Jessie hurried back downstairs, Warrick had still not put in an appearance.

  "He should be here," hissed Beatrice in a furious aside as dinner was announced.

  "He will be," whispered Jessie. "Something must have come up to delay him."

  Beatrice's thin nostrils flared angrily. "His brothers would never have behaved in such a fashion."

  Jessie sucked in a deep breath that did little to ease the old, familiar ache her mother's words stirred within her. Cecil and Reid, like their dead sisters, Catherine and Jane, had been obedient, steady, and reliably conventional. It was a never- ending source of chagrin to Beatrice that of the six children to whom she had given birth, only the two youngest and least satisfactory had survived. "Mother. He's only late for dinner."

  Beatrice smoothed her skirts with a rustle of black bombazine and jet beads. "I fear there is far more to it than that."

  Jessie stared at her mother's tense profile, but there was no time to say more, for Harrison was politely holding out his arm to his hostess, and Jessie could only follow them into dinner with Philippa.

  It wasn't until halfway through the soup course, while Jessie was arguing with Harrison about the importance of providing girls as well as boys with a formal education, that Warrick finally put in an appearance.

  "What would be the point?" Harrison was saying. "While I admit the existence of some unusually intelligent women, the fact remains that the vast majority of females are suited neither by temperament nor nature to the rigors of serious, prolonged study. It would be a waste of society's resources."

  "Perhaps," said Jessie tartly, "if women were better educated, their temperaments would change."

  Harrison shook his head. "You can't change nature, Jesmond. And in this instance, why would we want to?" He gave her a winsome, cajoling smile. "You ladies are so adorably lovely as you are."

  She knew he meant it as a compliment, but she still felt her cheeks flush with annoyance.

  "The trouble with you, dear sister," said a dry voice from the hall, "is that you keep forgetting the cardinal rule of our world." She looked up to find Warrick lounging in the doorway, one shoulder propped negligently against the jamb, a glass of what looked like brandy dangling from his fingers against his thigh. "The rule that says it's men who truly contribute to society. Whereas women—" He pushed away from the doorway and lifted his drink in a mock salute. "—women are intended merely to adorn it. Oh—and help reproduce it, of course."

  "Warrick," said Beatrice, her voice like ice water. "Since you have condescended to grace us with your presence, per- haps you would be kind enough to take a seat so that the main course may be served?"

  Warrick paused long enough to throw down the rest of his drink before saying, "My pleasure."

  Stiff with embarrassment, Jessie watched her brother as he went to settle into his customary seat at the head of the table, his cravat askew, a lock of hair tumbling over his brow in romantic dishevel. He had made it deliberately, ostentatiously obvious to everyone that it was some wild impulse of contrariness rather than an unexpected hitch in the workings of the estate that had delayed him. She glanced quickly from her mother's angry face, to Harrison's hard jaw, to Philippa's typically unruffled, calm demeanor, and understood, suddenly, why her brother was behaving so badly and what it was that he had done—and not done—to earn their mother's disapproval this time.

  It was Philippa, predictably, who guided the conversation, smoothly, to gentler, less explosive topics, while the servants moved quietly around the table and removed the soup bowls. Yet as the meal progressed, Jessie became aware of a curious sensation burning within her, as if she were experiencing some strange, unfamiliar emotion that welled up within her, unnamed and disconcerting. It wasn't until the covers were removed and the ladies rose to leave the gentlemen alone with their port and cigars that Jessie realized the source of that strange, illusive melancholy.

  She was intensely, inexplicably jealous of Warrick.

  She was getting ready for bed that night when she saw he
r brother standing alone at the far end of the second-story veranda, near his room. He stood with his back to her, his out- thrust hands resting on the railing, his gaze fixed on the black obscurity that enveloped the park and the hills beyond. Quietly, she opened the doors, felt the cool wind that ruffled the fair curls at the nape of her neck and caused her to tighten her grip on the shawl she held over her nightdress. She hesitated a

  moment, then walked toward him, down the length of the veranda, for their rooms were at opposite ends of the house.

  "I rather disrupted your homecoming dinner tonight, didn't I?" Warrick said, not looking at her. "Do I owe you an apology?"

  "No." She went to stand with her back against the veranda post beside him.

  He slanted a grin at her over his shoulder. "Then what is it?"

  She sucked in a deep breath. "You haven't offered for Philippa, have you?"

  He shook his head.

  "Are you going to?"

  He looked away from her again. "No."

  "But... it's expected of you."

  She watched as a slow smile curled his lips. "And when have I ever done what is expected of me? According to our mother, I delight in doing the exact opposite."

  She thrust the fingers of one hand through her loose, windblown hair, raking it away from her face. "I always thought you liked Philippa."

  She saw Warrick's chest lift, as if on a sad sigh. For it was true, if Harrison had been the companion of Jessie's childhood, then Warrick had been Philippa's special friend, always baiting her hook with worms so she wouldn't have to do it herself, and taking her side in her quarrels with Harrison. But now, he only shook his head again. "Unlike you, I prefer to find something warmer than mere liking in my marriage."

  "You shouldn't say such things."

  He let out a low, harsh laugh. "Why not? Why is it we're never allowed to speak of anything that might make us the least bit uncomfortable? What do you find most alarming? That I should openly admit that I don't actually love Philippa? Or that I should dare to wish to find passion in the arms of my wife? What do you think? That if something isn't spoken of, then it doesn't exist?"