by TJ Bennett
Chapter Four
Gerard, preceded by another footman bearing the candles, led me to the library in a lazy stroll. I fitted my hand into the crook of his elbow and inhaled his scent with deep, secret breaths. It was not cologne, but rather an elemental essence that clung to him that I could not identify.
At one point, I stumbled and gripped his arm tighter as an excuse to move closer and draw in more of his intoxicating scent. Gerard looked at me with an amused smile, almost as if he knew the game I played with myself, and he pressed his hand over mine.
Eventually we arrived at the library door, but rather than allow the footman to accompany us, he directed the man to wait with the candles outside the door. The note of alarm sounding deep inside was quickly silenced by the warmth of his smile as he gestured for me to go first.
We entered in, alone.
The room surprised me. It did not mimic the spacious grandeur of the rest of the house, but was smaller and more intimate. As we stepped over the threshold, my host closed the door behind us. I stared anxiously at it, but he distracted me by drawing my attention to the rows of heavy bookcases lining the walls. The coolness of the air, the lack of windows, and the diamond-shaped wall sconces glowing from a hidden light source spaced at regular intervals also caught my eye. I gazed at him in question as I shivered and rubbed my hands along my arms.
Gerard plucked a woolen wrap from an overstuffed armchair and tucked it around my shoulders. “You must forgive the cold. These books are my most precious possessions. They connect me to the world. I take great lengths to preserve them from the humidity and sea air.”
He motioned to a decorative trompe l’oeil of staked trellis vines winding around the room that nearly hid a series of intricate pipe works imbedded along the walls. “I had this room built especially to house the library some time ago. I designed a system that brings water from an underground well to cool it, and the torches here are constantly lit to prevent mildew from breeding on the leather bindings. The sconces direct the flame and smoke back out into a funnel system which draws it away from the books, minimizing the chances of fire or smoke damage.”
“How clever! However did you get the idea?”
He shrugged. “I found the basic designs in an ancient Roman text. I made a few modifications, given materials available to me here, and found they worked quite well.” He smiled at me, and he looked almost shy. “You are the first person in many years to whom I have shown this room. I hope you will feel free to make use of it during your stay.”
I gazed up in awe at the bookshelves. I spotted several works of Shakespeare, Descartes, Pascal, religious poetry by Milton and Donne, a bound, water-spotted selection of the Notes and Queries journals, Latin texts, several notable editions of the Holy Scriptures, and so much more. Some of the more modern pieces showed obvious water damage, indicating their origins were likely from the shipwrecks Gerard had mentioned. Maps and geographies, botany texts, biographies, and novels, some with French, Italian, and German titles.
“I envy you your collection. It is astonishingly complete, given the circumstances. You must spend hours here.”
He reached out his hand to stroke the binding of one of the books. “My library has been my schoolroom, and these books my teachers. I think of their authors as companions on the voyage of life and my only true friends.”
I stared at his fingers as he caressed the slim, leather-bound volume. Hands had always fascinated me. Each pair told a story about its owners that could be read like the lines in a book. His were long and elegant, like a musician’s, the nails squared-off, a topographic map of veins faintly visible across the backs.
He pulled the volume from its resting place and handed it to me.
I read the binding. “Shakespeare’s sonnets.” I smiled up at him. “You will never believe it. A few years ago, I answered the gentlewoman Florence Nightingale’s call to nurse our army’s soldiers during Britain’s campaign in the Crimean Theater. I was able to take only a few books with me. The Holy Bible and the Sonnets were my favorites.”
“Why those two?”
“In the midst of war, I wanted something to remind me that love survives.”
“Ah.” He nodded as if he understood. “Agape and Eros. The love of God, and the love between a man and a woman.” He gazed down at me. “Your calling to serve in such circumstances astounds me. I would not have suspected such employment of a genteel woman as yourself. And your family, your friends…did they, ah, counsel you on these enterprises before you began?”
“They counseled me against it most strenuously, of course. But I do not regret my choices. Miss Nightingale has shown me how to be useful. No embroidered pillow or pretty watercolor can provide the sense of fulfillment that comes with helping a man regain his health.”
“Was it a difficult time for you?”
I remembered the sounds and smells of death, of the men groaning out their last breaths, crying for their mothers, begging to live, to die, the acrid smells of bodily waste as their bodies released their fluids in those final moments. I had needed a constant reminder of love when I watched what hatred had wrought.
In imitation of Gerard’s earlier gesture, I stroked the binding of the book I held. “It was difficult. So much suffering…”
He shook his head.
“I meant as a woman in a man’s world,” he said. “I do not trivialize the other, but it must have been difficult for you as a female in such a place, especially someone of your station. I cannot imagine it.”
I laid my palm across the sonnets and sighed. “Miss Nightingale had very high standards for the conduct of the nurses. A nurse who committed an indiscretion had to be sent home immediately, and we could not spare the hands. We were not to encourage any man’s attentions. It was for our own protection.”
“But you must have been so young and full of life. And newly widowed, from what I gather?”
“I was twenty-two when my husband died. Twenty-three when I joined Miss Nightingale.”
“And no one has told you that you are beautiful in all this time?” His voice was soft, low, and intimate.
I deflected his compliment with an attempt at wry humor. “Oh, lonely drunken soldiers, and even sober married doctors, will say many things to a woman in such a place. But as long as one has most of her teeth and lacks a hump, all females are beautiful when the bombs are bursting overhead.”
I laughed, but he did not join me, only looking at me with a strangely sad expression.
“It sounds as though you have been very lonely, Catherine.” He moved closer, his smoky gray eyes narrowing on my face, a lock of his coal black hair tumbling over one dark brow. “I understand loneliness.”
“I imagine you do,” I said faintly and took a step back, skittish, the bookcase behind me impeding further retreat. My heart fluttered.
He placed one hand on the bookshelf beside my head and stood so close his body heat enveloped me. I tore my eyes from his sensually full lower lip, trying to find a safer place to rest my gaze, but his sculpted cheekbones and sleepy, lush-lashed eyes proved to be even more troublesome views.
“How do you bear it?” he asked. “How do you keep from running mad with it?”
His voice echoed my own misery.
Who says I have not run mad already? I hugged the book to my breast, concentrated on its gilt binding, its ragged edges. “I keep busy. I do not let my mind wander to places it cannot afford to go.”
“Such control,” he murmured.
“Thank you,” I whispered, keeping my head bent.
“It was not a compliment.”
That brought my head up, which I immediately regretted. He was too close, and I could not breathe.
“Control is a virtue,” I blurted, then steadied myself. “It is the mark of a disciplined mind, of-of a successful life. I do not hold with these romantic notions—”
He laid a finger across my lips. The gesture, in context, was as intimate as a kiss. My skin prickled with awareness, the drumming of
my heart’s blood sounding heavy in my ears.
He slowly removed his finger, stroking across my mouth as he did so, his touch leaving a trail of sparking heat in its wake. “In you I see the sort of control one forces on a wild creature which is meant to roam free, a creature that will gnaw off its own leg in an effort to escape its captivity.”
I stared at him in astonished panic. How could he say such things to me?
He tugged the book from my hands when I would have used it as a shield between us, and laid it aside. His gaze roamed my face, memorizing every detail, every eyelash. Then he moved closer, until no more than a breath of space separated our bodies, and leaning down, whispered into my ear as if he was telling me a secret. “We are cut from the same cloth, you and I. We pretend to others, of necessity, to be what we are not, until we nearly believe it ourselves. But inside…”
“Inside?” I asked, the word quivering in the air.
“Inside, our emotions flow like lava. Dangerous. Scalding. Unstoppable.” His warm breath feathered against my cheek, stirring a strand of my hair against it. His voice rumbled; I could feel it in my entire body.
I made a sound deep in my throat and bit it back. I felt liquid and hot, like the lava he described. I pressed my shoulders against the bookcase. “I-I am not like that. I am English.”
His laugh mocked me, as well it should have. I was ridiculous and defenseless, hopelessly out of my depth.
He gazed down at me, his height blocking the light, his face in shadow. “Yes,” he drawled, “so English. With your creamy skin and rebellious freckles. With your cool eyes and fiery hair. So full of contrasts. You are like an English rose hiding a set of wicked, wicked thorns.” He moved his other hand to the shelf beside my waist, inches away, but still he did not touch me.
“Would you prick me, Catherine,” he whispered, “if I reached for you? If your thorns drew blood, would you tend my wounds?”
The breath caught in my throat. His tongue flicked out, wetting that deliciously sinful lower lip, and his head bent toward me. Galvanized, I shoved hard at the arm that hemmed me in, freeing myself from his near embrace. I spun away from him, ashamed and aroused all at once.
“Don’t.” The word escaped me, the panicked confusion behind it obvious.
He leaned languidly against the bookcase, his expression challenging and yet innocent. “Don’t what?”
What was I doing?
I took a step back, my hands cold with the knowledge of what I had very nearly allowed. I could barely stomach the thought that while the children were about to be thrown out on the streets—might even be there now, starving and afraid and vulnerable—I had been flirting with a man I hardly knew, oblivious to my responsibilities. I could not forgive myself.
I touched the cameo with its dual images beneath my bodice. “I would like to go back to my room, please.”
“I would be delighted to escort you,” he said with a sultry smile.
I stiffened. “Alone.”
My behavior tonight must have given him the idea I might be willing. This had seemed a harmless flirtation to me, but I should have known better. Gerard was anything but harmless.
I straightened my back. His was not the first proposition I had ever received. I must stop behaving like a schoolgirl.
“Gerard, if I have given you any indication I am the sort of woman who would—would allow liberties on such a short acquaintance, forgive me. Men have all sorts of ideas about widows, but I must correct any such impressions at once.” I put a hand to my forehead, damp with perspiration even in this cool air, and dabbed at it. “I am not myself. Blame it on my ordeal or on the wine, if you wish, but let this incident never be spoken of again.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “What incident? We only talked of books and nature. I see no harm done.”
I looked at him, bewildered. Had I been the only one affected by the emotions in this room?
He moved toward me, and I hastily stepped back, but he only reached to open the door behind me as he walked past. “I will have my servant escort you to your room. We cannot have you getting lost along the way.”
Relief poured through me. I removed the wool wrap from my shoulders.
He took it from me and returned it to its original location. “I will come to you again tomorrow night.”
“Do not trouble yourself.” At this point, I thought it best to break the pattern of intimacy that we seemed to have fallen into. “I believe I shall rise early and walk to the village tomorrow morning to investigate it. And I will have supper in my room.”
He motioned for the footman to attend me. “You will do neither of those things unaccompanied. If you wish to see the village, Mrs. Jones can take you in the carriage with two footmen. It is advisable to always have someone with you.” He took my hand then and bowed over it. When he rose, those knowing gray eyes gleamed. “And I would not miss another meal like this one for the world.” He released me, and turning on his heel, strode away.
Troubled, I watched him withdraw, wondering how he could see in the dark corridor to find his way without a candle or a torch. But of course this was his home, and he’d lived here most of his life. He would know it well enough to traverse it in the dark.
What troubled me more was why Gerard insisted I needed the guardianship of two footmen and Mrs. Jones to attend me when I visited the village.
And while I made my way back to my room to be locked in, I wondered if my assigned phalanx’s main purpose was not to protect me from the villagers but to serve as an effective barrier between what I wished to know about Ynys Nos, and what Gerard wished for me to know.
Chapter Five
The night had been disturbing to me in a number of ways, not the least of which was my realization Gerard would not be in any hurry to assist me in leaving the island. It frustrated me, yet at the same time, I understood why.
I could not imagine what his life had been like, a man with no equals with whom to form a friendship. His descriptions of the village suggested no one else of his class resided there, and as master of Alexander Hall, he would find it impossible to socialize with members of his staff, even if he could find one of like mind and sensibilities. I was clearly beneath him in social rank, but being that I was a gentlewoman, he may have decided to overlook Society’s rules as they would otherwise apply to me.
It seemed to me Gerard was starved for companionship, and his need drew me as a beacon drew a moth. I’d never met anyone like him before; he struck me as larger than life, grander than the ordinary males who inhabited my earthly sphere. He wore his shimmering sensuality like a golden robe over naked flesh: glittering and mesmerizing and impossible to look away from. It was daunting, and I’d only been exposed to him for a few days. I could not imagine what the women of this island must endure on a constant basis. I’d bet it was nigh impossible for him to establish simple friendships, for surely the men must be as threatened by him as the women were entranced?
I shuddered to think how I would react in his circumstance if I had been the one confined to the same few miles of land and the same people for years without possibility of escape, with no one to share my heart. The idea it might very well be me someday, I thrust aside.
As the result of a night of troubled sleep, I did not rouse until well after noon. When I did, I was determined to visit the village and seek out a method of extricating myself from this intolerable situation. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and noticed a slim, leather-bound book on the nightstand. I knew before I picked it up it was the volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets I had admired from Gerard’s library. I looked at the door. The key had been in it when I returned, and this time, I had been the one to lock it behind me. I rose and tested it now; it was still locked.
Apparently, there was another key, though how he’d managed to work it with this key still in the lock I could not imagine. I tightened my lips and picked up the book, understanding there would be no privacy here unless Gerard wished it.
&n
bsp; Perhaps he meant the book—and the key—as a sort of peace offering; I did not know. Notably absent was any accompanying book of Holy Scriptures I had told him I also favored.
Eros without Agape.
I set the volume aside.
The authorities must have begun searching for me by now. News of the Merry Widow’s foundering would surely have made its way back to port. While no one knew precisely which ship I had boarded, or indeed that I had boarded any at all, it would only require minor inquiries to conclude I had left the Isle of Man secretly and taken the ship to Liverpool.
I had been owner and head proprietress of the Benevolent Home for Disadvantaged Children for the past two years. I provided an education and a daily hot meal, as well as a safe place for the children to live, in the hopes that they might better themselves and become productive members of society.
My father-in-law had wrongly believed he could bring me to heel by putting my money into his own accounts and refusing to consign me more than a pittance of an allowance, so that I might not support the children of whores. When his bankers realized the notes of credit from Jonathan’s father had been forged, they would waste no time in pursuing me for fraud.
I had counted that payment of the overdue taxes on the Benevolent Home with the stolen notes and coins I’d hidden in my reticule would buy enough time for the sale of my own home to conclude. But I had not anticipated the storm or the loss of the money.
Now I was trapped here, a victim of circumstance, while the clock ticked away and time turned from friend to enemy.
It did not matter. I would find a way home.
I was determined. I was unstoppable.
The word brought back memories of Gerard’s strangely erotic speech last night, and I pushed that thought aside as well.
No more distractions.
More than anything, I could not allow myself to dwell on my attraction to him. As an unchaperoned female guest in his home, I was already courting disaster. Hence my determination to visit the village today: if I couldn’t find passage off the island, other lodgings might be had which would prevent me from falling into disrepute if I should have to stay awhile. Tempting as a liaison with Gerard might be, I could not become entangled with any man at this point in my life. Aside from the moral implications, the children needed me, and the actions I had taken to protect them could bring ruin upon any man associated with me.