by Lara Temple
‘When it counts, miss.’
‘Thank you, Tippet,’ Alan interrupted. ‘Come along, Miss Wallace, we don’t want to be late for the wailing Italian.’
As she turned, a scurrying in the doorways and on the stairs marked the careful retreat of whatever spectators had gathered.
* * *
Philip Marston hadn’t been exaggerating, Penny was indeed an angel, or as closely resembling one as a human was likely to manage. Lily hated being petty, but she would have preferred that the pale gold beauty at least be spoilt or nasty, but in a matter of minutes Lily realised she was not only shy, but quite sweet and more than willing to think the best of Lily if her father so desired.
‘This is my very first concert,’ she told Lily in a hushed tumble of words as Marston turned to address some comments to Lady Ravenscar and Catherine. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand Italian at all. I did try to apply myself, but I simply have no ear for languages, my schoolmistress says. Do you speak Italian, Miss Wallace? Papa says you lived in many exciting places. I do so envy you.’
‘Your papa is exaggerating, though I suppose they may seem exciting to others. It is true there were people from all over the world in the mines where my father worked and I learned a little of everything, but mostly they spoke Portuguese or Spanish. Your papa said you are to have your first Season this spring. You must be excited.’
‘I am... Oh, good afternoon, Lord Ravenscar.’
‘Good afternoon, Miss Marston. Congratulations on having finally put school behind you. Or should I be congratulating your schoolmistress?’
Penny giggled, surprising Lily. She hadn’t realised Alan might be acquainted with Penny, but if he and Philip Marston shared business concerns, it was not surprising, though she would have expected Marston to shield his innocent and wealthy beauty of a daughter from a man like Alan with the zealousness of an evangelist.
‘I’m afraid I didn’t apply myself quite as I ought.’
‘Only bores apply themselves as they ought, so that need not concern you. Now you can apply yourself as you wish. As long as you don’t apply yourself wholly to what you oughtn’t.’
Penny Marston’s feather-soft brows drew together in confusion.
‘Are you making game of me again, Lord Ravenscar?’
‘He is trying to be clever and failing miserably, Miss Marston. Come, we should find ourselves a comfortable place to sit or risk being forced to stand through the wailing Italian as Lord Ravenscar so quaintly titled a woman accustomed to singing for kings and emperors.’
‘An excellent idea. Allow me.’
That had not been quite what she intended, to find Alan seated between her and Miss Marston on one of the long upholstered benches arranged before the low stage where the musicians had already gathered. Lily met Philip Marston’s sardonic smile, expecting him to sit by his daughter, but as he led Lady Ravenscar and Catherine over by some deft manoeuvre, he sat himself by Lily, with Catherine on his other side, while Lady Ravenscar was seated on Penny Marston’s left side under the rationale that she would thus be furthest from any draught from the windows.
Lily caught the widening of Penny’s eyes and turned in protest towards Philip Marston, but he merely smiled and murmured close to her ear, ‘Don’t worry for Penny. It will do her good to meet a tame dragon and Lord Ravenscar will shield her if need be. He has known her for many years. Here is the programme, Lady Catherine. I’m afraid there aren’t enough, so we shall have to share. Do you speak Italian?’
Lily watched in trepidation as Lady Ravenscar began catechising the beauty, but clearly Philip Marston had been accurate and Penny’s good manners were finding favour with her even without the threat of intervention from Alan and Lily began to relax, as much as she could seated between the two men.
If she needed any reminder of her folly, her treacherous body was only too happy to oblige. The room was a trifle cold and most women were swathed in shawls, but the whole left side of Lily’s body was shimmering with warmth. She knew precisely how many inches separated her thigh from Alan’s, three, and her elbow from his, two. If she just shifted a little to rearrange her shawl, she could finally bridge that chasm and...
‘Do you happen to know what strazio means, Miss Wallace? The first song is in German, which is beyond us, but Lady Catherine and I have been attempting to decipher the Italian lyrics for the second song.’
Lily took the programme Philip Marston was extending to her and stared at the word he was pointing to, her mind untangling itself from shawls and chasms and heat.
‘It means...’ She cleared her throat. ‘Torment. I think.’
‘Is it a sad song, then?’ Penny enquired.
‘It is a song about a woman who is pledged to one man but keeps thinking about another,’ Alan answered without inflection. ‘Does that qualify as sad or merely a case of faulty judgement on her part?’
‘Hush!’ Lady Ravenscar said loudly as the singer, an unremarkable-looking woman with dark hair and eyes and a rather pinched mouth, finally climbed to the stage. The buzz and chatter around them thinned and stopped and then the heavens opened. The singer’s voice rose above that of the violins, pure and true, the most beautiful thing Lily had heard in years. On Isla Padrones they had believed dead babies’ souls were collected by angels who soothed their new charges’ ascent to heaven with divine song. The villagers had sung as they took the housekeeper’s baby to the little churchyard on the far side of the island, their voices radiating the same joy and hope of redemption. She hadn’t cried then, she had been too guilty and too frightened and had not wanted to draw any more attention to herself as she shadowed the procession, but now it took all her effort not to sink her face in her hands and cry out her confusion, like the tired child she had been then.
The room held its breath until the last note shivered and faded and then the applause burst forth. Lily sat with her hands pressed together in a simulacrum of clapping or prayer, holding hard against the need to cry.
‘Beautiful.’ She hadn’t meant to speak, it was hardly more than a breath, but Alan turned to her.
‘Lily?’
He bent close to her, his breath smoothing over her cheek and pressing against her ear like a fluttering kiss. She shook her head and felt the careful ringlets Lady Ravenscar’s maid had toiled over brush against him and then his finger touched the skin between her sleeve and the edge of her glove above her elbow, sliding down, as soft as a feather, the shawl concealing the contact. His voice was as soft, hardly a whisper.
‘Don’t. I’m sorry.’
Luckily the singing began again and the pain eased, but not the thudding of her pulse or the need to lean against him. She abandoned all attempt to remain in the room, letting everything fall away but his proximity, facing the truth. She had slept with her cheek against his chest, her hand in his. She knew the rhythm of his pulse. He probably didn’t even remember that, but it was part of her and now her body was drawn to his as to a lodestone. Her tiny universe had expanded during those days at Hollywell and it now included one very unrepentant rake. She still had a choice, but it would require a more brutal act on her part than she had wanted to believe.
Chapter Fourteen
He had sunk low indeed. Bringing tepid lemonade to his grandmother at the Bristol Assembly Hall was not something he would have considered a possibility just a week ago. Once fate sank its talons into you, it did so with a vengeance.
‘Where has Lily gone?’ Lady Ravenscar hissed between clenched teeth as Alan handed her the glass. His own jaw tightened as he turned to view the room.
‘Nowhere, Grandmother. She is with Cat and the Marstons.’
‘Not any more, I saw her by the back door and that is not the direction of the withdrawing rooms. Why the devil is that man still fawning over her? I thought she sent him packing.’
‘Lily is hedging her bets, Lady Jezebel.’
/>
‘And you are going to stand for that?’
He didn’t bother replying. Anything he said at the moment would probably not end well. He had been stoking his anger at Lily for the past two days. It was a useful countermeasure to the persistent desire that pulsed through him like a remnant of the fever. It kept him focused on duty and action and away from the unsettling reactions to this impossible girl. Like that moment at the end of the first song when she had been leaning forward, her lips parted as if she had been the one singing. The candles had raised her warmth to fire, her hair shimmering with copper and gold and amber and her skin reflecting the blush peach of her dress. He didn’t know what the taut, almost tragic expression on her face had meant, but she had been close to tears for a moment. It had been impossible not to reach out and touch her, however briefly, and even that tiny gesture had cost him, reminding him how much more he wanted than a chaste caress of her arm. Giving a sip of water to a man with a raging thirst was more torture than relief.
In a saner world he would have been able to take her hand, lead her out of this stifling room and...
He frowned and scanned the clusters of people talking and fanning themselves at the back of the room. On impulse he stepped into the hallway that separated the assembly hall from the smaller meeting rooms of the guildhall and glanced up the carpeted stairs guarded by a rather sad-looking Roman bust on a pedestal.
‘Female troubles, too, Agrippa?’ He patted the balding head as he moved towards the open door of the guild meeting hall across the hallway and paused in the doorway. A still figure stood looking up at the large painting commemorating the Battle of Trafalgar, all taut sails and thrashing waves and bursts of cannons. The room was cold and only the light from two high windows touched the lighter colours with some life.
‘What are you hiding from now?’
She whirled around, her skirts billowing like a fluted flower.
‘I am not hiding, I needed to think. Then I saw this painting and was curious.’
He was tempted to ask her what she had been thinking about, but he doubted it would redound to his credit. After Nicky’s devastating discourse about children he didn’t want to talk about anything profound. He looked at the painting instead.
‘Decent, but inaccurate. The storm came after the battle was won, and the HMS Sandwich didn’t even take part in the battle.’
‘Let me guess, Nelson was a hero of yours and you know all the names of all the ships and whom they took as prizes.’
‘Of course. I was fifteen. My friends and I were masters of naval strategy even though none of us had set foot on more than a barge. I would have joined the Navy when I left Ravenscar, but luckily by then I wanted Napoleon’s head, so I enlisted with the Rifles instead.’
‘Why luckily?’
‘I get seasick.’
‘Really?’ Amusement warmed the gold in her eyes and some of his tension eased.
‘Not really, but I definitely don’t enjoy the thought of spending months at a stretch in a small space with a group of rank-smelling men eating weevil-riddled hard tack.’
‘I can’t imagine anyone does. Jackson, my groom, was pressed into service as a boy until my father took him to work with him. He had some horrific tales to tell. But the war must have been just as horrible. I saw those men today.’
‘Peace has been just as hard on many of them. We had a purpose during the war and a family of sorts. All that went by the wayside when they returned to England, some less than whole in body or mind, and found they had no livelihood. A great deal more than vanity rides on a man’s pride. Come, we need to return.’ He hesitated. ‘What were you thinking about?’
‘Precisely that. Those men. Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted Hollywell as a home for war veterans? I cannot understand why that is a secret.’
‘Ah, the ferret is back. It isn’t a secret, but it is private and no one’s concern but ours. This is not a topic for a musical evening.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because. Besides, I told you we are no longer interested in Hollywell.’
‘Yes, you are. You were telling Mr Tippet that Saltford is too small. If I am willing to put Hollywell at your disposal, why not take it?’
‘What do you mean put it at our disposal?’
‘Precisely that. I won’t sell it because I understand from Mr Prosper that landed property is the only kind of property a married woman retains any form of control over, however truncated, but I will provide you with an indefinite lease at a symbolic cost and that way you could use the purchase price for any adjustments you need to make to the structure and for whatever other needs arise. I would have one stipulation, but it is a small one and we needn’t discuss it now. I can speak with Mr Prosper tomorrow and you can begin bringing people there immediately.’
The words poured out of her, establishing facts and setting up barriers, and all the tension and anger he was trying to push aside returned, as hot and immediate as the desire she evoked in him so effortlessly.
‘If this is some form of sacrificial apology because you think you can weasel your way out of this engagement, let me tell you...’
‘It is an offer, pure and simple. Do you know that if you had a modicum of trust in people, we might have resolved this issue at Saltford and none of this would have happened? Let that be a lesson to you to be less secretive and distrustful in future. You forgo golden opportunities.’
‘Is that what happened? Most people would argue that what happened is quite the opposite.’
‘Oh, yes, I’m aware what a golden opportunity my inheritance is...’
He grasped her shoulders as she started moving past him.
‘I actually wasn’t referring to your three per cents, but to other assets altogether. But this is hardly the right place for me to clarify my meaning. Or perhaps it is, at least if we are interrupted, you won’t be able to hide from your actions. This isn’t a game and Marston and I are not two dolls on a shelf for you to choose from, so it is time to abandon the delusion that you have a choice here. You gambled with your fate and you lost—that is life. I suggest you stop all this soulful flirting with Marston and start honouring the hand you dealt yourself. In a week we will announce our engagement to friends and you can begin planning your bridals.’
‘How could any woman resist such a sweetly phrased offer?’
She tried to pull away, but he held firm, moving in.
‘Is that what you want? Once I have you somewhere we are less likely to be interrupted, I will show you precisely how hard it will be to resist a sweetly phrased offer. Stop acting like Andromeda being offered as sacrifice to some damn sea monster. And Marston is no Perseus.’
He was too angry to be conciliating, but instead of matching his thrust she withdrew in one of her disconcerting surrenders that always left him far more vulnerable than victor.
‘I know that. If anyone is the sacrifice here, it is you because this is all my fault. You must think me terribly ungrateful and spoilt. But that is precisely the point, you see. I don’t want anyone to suffer because of my mistakes. I’ve not only ruined your life, but also brought this strife between you and Philip when neither of you are to blame. It is so unfair.’
He should tell her that right now it didn’t feel at all like a sacrifice. Not with her looking up at him with that mix of contrition and compassion, her lips soft and parted, just waiting for him to taste them again. Right now the only thing that felt like a sacrifice was the weeks that would have to pass before he could finally do something about this aggravating, aching need. He felt perilously close to that sea monster, focused on mindless devouring.
He needed to take her back into the main hall, he needed to keep his footing in the shifting sands around her, he needed...
He pressed her back, bringing her up against the door.
‘I’m not concerned with fairness at the
moment. Just stay away from Marston. Understand?’ He didn’t give her a chance to answer. His body moulded itself against hers, his mouth finally lowering to find the moist warmth he was thirsting for, filling with her scent and taste. It was hopeless. He needed this. This wasn’t the passion and pleasure he knew so well; it was like drinking the finest cognac after years of warm ale. He wouldn’t be able to go back even if he wanted to and he didn’t.
He felt her shiver between him and the door and he gentled the kiss and pulled away, cupping her face in his hands. Her eyes opened slowly and he waited out the inevitable burn of heat that struck him at the half-lost softness there. His once-clear vision of the future was lying in a shamble at her feet and he had no idea where he was heading. He had made wealth, he had found purpose and, until he had walked into the library at Hollywell, he hadn’t wanted or needed anything else.
But everything precious came at a price. He had never thought he would have to pay this one.
He breathed in, twice.
‘Come. We must return to the others.’
* * *
‘There you are, Miss Wallace. Ravenscar,’ Marston said as he and Catherine intercepted them as they entered the assembly hall. ‘Lady Ravenscar asked Lady Catherine and myself to find you. She said she had already sent you, Ravenscar, but perhaps you were feeling unwell, Miss Wallace?’
Lily raised her chin at the censure in his voice.
‘Everything is quite all right, Mr Marston. Lord Ravenscar and I were merely discussing my offer to lease Hollywell House to his war veteran foundation.’
Alan couldn’t help smiling at Lily’s diversionary tactics. By the look on Marston’s face it was a surprise attack worthy of Wellington.
‘I... What?’
‘The Hope House foundation, Mr Marston,’ Catherine’s calm voice poured soothing oil on the rising waves as she explained the nature of the foundation and Alan’s original plans for Hollywell before Albert’s death. ‘I think that is very generous of you, Lily,’ she concluded. ‘So is it settled then?’