“You distrust the judgment of your sister so completely, Mr. Redmond?”
There was a silence.
“No,” he admitted. “Not completely.”
It was an admission that she might be something other than a stranger, and they both began to smile.
“I’m so flattered.”
She could not, however, deny the logic in his concern. She in fact reluctantly respected it.
She tamped her pride. “What will reassure you, Mr. Redmond, that I am not a thief or murderess?”
“From where do you hail? Who are your people?” he said quickly.
Cynthia turned her head toward the stream, as if imagining a boat upon on it, taking her away from here. A tense twig race was taking place. Milthorpe seemed to be captaining the enterprise. He was shouting nautical-sounding orders and waving his arms, and Jonathan and Argosy were kneeling on the bank, as the ladies clustered and cheered them on.
“Do you have any dogs here at Redmond House?” she asked suddenly.
“Of course. Why? Did you wish to practice liking them?”
She smiled again. “I thought Lord Milthorpe might enjoy the company of one.”
“Really? What makes you think so?”
They both smiled at this. And again this exchange of smiles somehow made the world seem dizzyingly large, and made it strangely, deliciously, difficult to breathe.
But then Miles watched as Cynthia shifted restlessly, as if drawing that opened-up world closer about her again.
He waited. He didn’t think for a moment she’d forgotten his question.
“Has it occurred to you, Mr. Redmond, that it might be difficult for me to speak of my family?”
“Yes,” he said promptly. “I suppose I never imagined, however, that you were afraid of difficulty.”
Admiration for this gambit made a rueful smile slowly light her eyes and then her entire face.
Oh, her smile. He felt it like a sharp, shining half-moon in his chest.
He looked swiftly at Lady Georgina, toward her pale gentle colors and curves, to remind himself of his future, of his passion and ambition and duty. And at Lady Middlebough, to remind him of what he allegedly desired. To distract himself from the uncomfortable, baffling intensity of…
…joy.
The word frightened him.
No. That couldn’t be right. He was never frightened.
“Very well.” She sighed. “You asked about my people…well, my mother is dead. She died when I was young. I haven’t seen my father since I was five years old. He left us. I imagine he’s dead now, too. I am two and twenty now. Allegedly, my family was related, in some distant way, to a baron.” She punctuated this with a faint ironic smile. “But I know only what I was told, and I don’t know the name of this baron. I hail from Little Roxford by way of Battersea, in London; we moved to the country—I suspect we fled debtors or something less savory since this happened in the dead of night—when I was six years old. When my mother died, I was taken in by the vicar of Little Roxbury and his wife. They were very kind. I had a penchant for mischief, it seemed, and she found me a pleasant challenge.” A wicked little uplift of the brow here. “But the vicar’s wife died when I was eighteen years old, and the vicar’s new wife…” a faint twist of the mouth here. “…wanted little to do with me. She cast me out. The Standshaws befriended me. I went with them to London.” She spread her hands as if to say: and that is all.
Dead, dead, dead. Each time she said the word, she enunciated it very clearly, from d to d, as if punishing herself or punishing him for asking. It was such a heavy word, an ending of a word. How had she gone from being turned out by the second wife of a village vicar to becoming the toast of the ton, the fiancée to the heir of an earl? How had it all come crashing down?
How true was any of this?
A common blue flapped by on its way to, he suspected, taking nectar from a self-heal, into which it would nearly blend as it feasted. Nature was clever that way. Beautiful and terrible and practical.
He remembered his first look at Cynthia: her face turned up into the chandelier light, the bemused, encompassing delight on her face. He could imagine why now. And the sheer determination of the girl. What mischief this orphan had stirred in the ton that season. No one, he suspected, had ever enjoyed popularity more.
Beneath her eyes were faint blue semicircles. Nearly the color of the wings of the common blue.
She wasn’t sleeping well.
He felt his feet shift restlessly.
The sun beat down even through the trees, warmed his arms. A bead of sweat began the journey from his collarbone down his chest.
“A vicar?” He was quietly incredulous. This was the part of her story he decided to take up.
The question emerged sharper than he wished it to. Because he cared more than he wanted to.
Her mouth smiled. Her eyes did not. “Test me on scripture, Mr. Redmond.”
“Luke 12:15.” He whipped out the verse like a rapier.
“And he said to them, ‘Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.’ Very witty, Mr. Redmond, as usual. I expect nothing less of you. But if I wanted to invent my past, I might have concocted a more imaginative tale. Russian royalty, perhaps. I did not invent my past. It’s precisely as colorless as I paint it. I hope to, however, invent my future. As you well know.”
She looked evenly at him. Blue eyes dark with challenge.
He leaned back against the tree thoughtfully. They were quiet together.
The common blue decided instead to flutter about Miss Brightly, perhaps confusing her for a nectar-bearing flower or another butterfly.
She smiled at its confusion. “Beautiful color, I’ve always thought. Seems unfair to call it a common blue.” She held out her hand, as if hoping it would alight. Alas, the butterfly came to its senses and hied off to drink from the self-heal.
“I would never have seen you at all if not for a butterfly.” The words had emerged from him with no warning, as though he’d fired them from a bow.
Her head jerked up. She stared at him.
“Morpho rhetenor Helena.” He smiled a little, made those Latin words sound like an incantation. “Native to the South American jungles. It’s large, iridescent, beautiful—blues, greens, violets in its wings. It was the Malverney Ball, two years ago. Your dress. I…I thought your dress…”
Abashed, he trailed off. She was staring at him so wonderingly.
And he couldn’t speak, he wouldn’t speak, when he could simply drink up the blue of her eyes with his own.
They were both aware of the trickle of the river, the other voices. The sounds might have emanated from another universe.
She’d been wearing a blue dress that night. She’d been wearing green when he’d kissed her. In Tudor times prostitutes wore green dresses so the grass stains wouldn’t show on their dresses when they were taken ferociously outdoors.
He thought she was fortunate indeed to be wearing white muslin right now.
He wanted to sink into her. He felt a white hot desire that stole his breath again. He glanced toward Georgina, the key to his other passion, to his whole life. To calm his breathing, a search for sanity.
And then suddenly the intensity of Cynthia’s gaze flickered with a hint of trouble. “A…blue dress? I wore a blue dress?”
He could see her reaching for the memory of the ball, for a memory of him.
He closed his face abruptly, guillotining the moment. “You once had a fiancé?” he said abruptly.
She blinked at the abrupt change. “Yes, Mr. Redmond. I had a fiancé,” she said quietly, ironically.
“Did you tell him about your past, your family?” He was distantly aware that she had begun to feel restless and cornered, but the questioning seemed to have acquired an impetus.
“I did.”
“And is this why he cried off? Or did you cry off?”
“No,” she said curtly.
“It is not why he cried off. It mattered little to him.” She fixed him with one of those enigmatic looks. Faintly cutting, almost pitying. “Though I bear responsibility for the reason he cried off, I did not end the engagement. Why on earth would I, Mr. Redmond? He was an heir. Very wealthy, too.”
She cast a quick gaze around the vast green sea of the Redmond estate, as if assessing it against her erstwhile fiancé’s wealth and thinking it perhaps paled. It worked precisely as she’d meant it to: he felt a swift surge of combativeness.
“Then what happened, Miss Brightly?”
She sighed. She turned away from him slowly, as though the conversation had made her weary. Tipped her face up to the sun, drawn by the warmth of it, perhaps, or instinctively seeking out pleasure in the midst of his uncomfortable questioning.
Then she changed her mind and put her face down again. Freckles and brown skin would not do, particularly since her beauty was her particular asset.
“Nothing that does me any credit,” she said evenly, almost wryly. He was aware of a tension in her: she found the words difficult to say, and he knew them instinctively to be honest. “And nothing that will unduly discredit your family should you learn of it, as it was nothing out of the ordinary, even if it was unpleasant. I comprehend this matters greatly to you—the safety and honor of your family. I promise you, I seldom lie. Something about being raised by a vicar. Shouldn’t you be speaking with Lady Georgina? She will be feeling neglected.”
A glance showed Miles that Lady Georgina was being shown how to make a whistle from a reed by Jonathon and Lord Argosy, and Violet was speaking with Lady Windermere and Lady Middlebough and Lord Milthorpe.
He wondered if the two women could be counted on to remember that Violet was an unmarried woman, and refrain from saying anything too fascinating—or, in the case of Lady Middlebough—too incriminating.
“Scarcely a minute or so has passed, Miss Brightly. It’s entirely possible Lady Georgina will survive my absence.”
Interesting how the two of them seemed to create their own time inside of time.
“Yes, but I’m not certain I will much longer survive your presence, Mr. Redmond. I am, as ever, interested in self-preservation.”
He smiled then. He touched his fingers to his head as though his hat sat there, though his hat sat upon the picnic blanket with the hats of all the other men, and strode abruptly off to join Lady Georgina and his sister, who welcomed him with smiles.
Cynthia leaned back against the sustaining trunk of the crack willow and exhaled.
It was decided soon after to leave for the house, as rain was an ever-increasing likelihood, and so the carnage of their meal was bundled, the hamper packed, and the trip undertaken at a swift clip.
On the way back, Milthorpe accidentally crashed through the grand spider’s web. Cynthia saw it: a sad, fluttering tatter from the hedgerow.
“Demmed spiders,” Milthorpe muttered cheerfully, and trudged onward.
Cynthia almost felt the destruction personally. She wondered what had become of the spider. She paused, stared at the flutter.
And suddenly Miles was next to her. “She’ll rebuild it,” he told her. He’d interpreted her troubled expression correctly. “She won’t think anything of it. It’s just a part of her life. Sewing her world back together again, sometimes even daily.”
He said it lightly. It sounded as though he were reassuring her.
Peculiarly, she did feel reassured. Just a part of her life. The savage tearing down of what looked to be an enormous undertaking would simply be taken up again, and would reappear in the morning as a new, complicated, fragile little net. It was the spider’s nature.
Cynthia looked up. From this angle she could see the underside of his elegant jaw, shaved spotlessly clean; she could see where his glossy dark hair touched his ears below his hat. It wanted scissoring. She knew a shocking rush of tenderness. She wanted to touch it. Was it crisp? Or feathery, like the wing of a bird? Or silky, like a spaniel?
She turned her head away with some difficulty. Unnerved.
Ahead of them, the handsome Lord Argosy’s curls beneath his own hat contrived to be both mussed and deliberate as one of those ruthlessly trimmed Redmond hedgerows or the slim cypresses arrowing up to the sky.
Everywhere, those trees created neat walls and divisions within the property, partitioning it in such a way as to perhaps make everyone feel more secure within its sheer grandeur, like aristocratic sheep in a very grand pen. Providing an illusion of order, and hinting that a certain amount of captivity—to fortune, to family name, to history, to duty—was also involved.
“Will she start the web over completely?” Cynthia was surprised to realize she was genuinely interested in the spider’s fate.
“She’ll use the half already made to build it, and it will be stronger than before, if not quite as symmetrical. More interesting, however. Did you know that spider silk is stronger in some ways than steel?”
Hmm. Perhaps not so fragile a net, then. And if this were indeed true, she wished that spiders were in the business of repairing shoes. She glanced down at her own.
Felt her resolve solidify again. She looked at the solid back of Milthorpe in front of her. She knew he was the man she should be walking alongside. Or Argosy.
“But it looks so delicate there, moving when the wind moves it.” She still sought reassurance from Miles.
“Perhaps that’s its strength. The flexibility. The fragility. Appearances…” He paused. “…are often deceiving.”
She was silent. Was this an apology? Was she being complimented obliquely? The thought disarmed her. Because if it was indeed a compliment…
It was quite simply the best she’d ever received. No one had ever before admired her for the things she liked best about herself. Because she was very careful to never show that part to anyone.
Strand by strand Miles Redmond was unwinding the cocoon she’d spun for herself out of observation, charm, and ambition. It was both compelling and extraordinarily unfair.
It then occurred to her that he might simply be speculating aloud about her the way he would any small, shiny exotic creature with legs. He wanted to understand her; he was hoping to coax more clues from her. After all, he was forced to host this gathering in the absence of his parents, and it was hardly a South Sea island, was it?
Well, he could bloody well put Lady Georgina beneath his microscope.
She took two quick strides forward. It was enough for her to fall into conversational parallel with Lord Argosy, a much more familiar, less unnerving specimen to her:
The London blood.
“Do you dance, Miss Brightly?” Lord Argosy asked without preamble. As though he’d been expecting her all along. He slid her a sidelong glance, then slid his gaze away again. His smile was secretive, pleased and inclusive. We know we’re the best-looking people here, is what it said. Let’s enjoy being young and beautiful.
“But of course,” she told him easily. As though they were just picking up a conversational thread.
“Do you play?”
She paused, wondering if an innuendo lurked in the word.
“The…pianoforte?” she guessed, carefully.
“Yes! Please say that you do not. Or that you will not. I could not abide another indifferent recital, and I know if it rains this evening it’s what we will have. I have five sisters you know. Five of them,” he said glumly.
“Oh, no one would be able to dance while I play. Or, rather, a good deal of wincing would take place simultaneous with the dancing, and eyes would therefore be shut more often than open, and the dancers would collide with one another. I play quite, quite badly.”
“I’m relieved to hear of it. But perhaps I’ll request a song for the pleasure of hearing you botching it.”
Cynthia laughed, and he laughed, and his laugh was mercifully ordinary: merry and deep and male. Lord Argosy was pleased with himself but not insufferably so; life was good to him and doubtless always had been.
And besides, all young aristocratic heirs were pleased with themselves. He was charming.
And he might very well be one of those lords who possessed a splendid title but was in need of a fortune to support everything that came with the title: lands and castles filled with spoils of ancient battles.
She would need to know more about Lord Argosy.
She threw a glance over her shoulder, toward the person who would tell her the things she needed to know about him. For some reason, she’d wanted to see if Miles had heard and was wondering about her laughter. Lord Milthorpe might possess comic possibilities. Argosy was a different matter altogether.
She saw two heads lowered in what appeared to be easy, quiet conversation: Miles Redmond and Lady Georgina, who “shared his interests.” Very dark, very light. He’d adjusted his pace to match her shorter legs, and they were strolling in tandem.
“Mr. Redmond! How very interesting,” Lady Georgina was saying enthusiastically.
And suddenly Cynthia was blindsided, weakened, by an urge to know what this was like: easiness and openness and quiet. Not flirtation and strategy and bartered kisses and hectic laughter.
She simply wanted to be courted again. She did not want to need to court the courting.
Ah, well. She hadn’t been born a Redmond, or any sort of aristocrat. And when she thought of how far she’d come entirely on her own, fleas came to mind: how their tiny bodies could leap astonishing distances, distances equivalent to miles beyond their size. She was merely resting between leaps, she told herself.
Why on earth did all of her metaphors suddenly include insects?
She squared her shoulders, as if shaking off the notion of them, and of the man who made her wonder about them.
And because she’d promised to be good and she thought she’d done a fine job of it for the day, she rewarded herself with a moment of imagining a distant future that included walking quietly side by side with a husband over some grand property. They would both have gray hair, and the green trees and lawns as far as their eyes could see would belong to them, and perhaps a spaniel named Lady Georgina would frolic about their feet.
Like No Other Lover Page 9