The Secret Pearl

by Mary Balogh

  Fleur stooped down and took the child’s cold hands in hers. “It is the most glorious feeling in the world to ride a horse,” she said. “To be high on the back of an animal who can move so much more surely and swiftly than we can. There is no greater sense of freedom and joy.”

  “But Mama says I could break my neck,” Lady Pamela wailed. “I want to stay here with Tiny.”

  “You can break your neck if you ride recklessly,” Fleur said. “That is why Papa is going to be with you to teach you to ride properly. He would not allow you to fall, would he? And I would not, would I?”

  Lady Pamela still looked dubious, but she allowed the duke to lift her into his arms and carry her into the paddock and seat her on the little sidesaddle on the pony’s back. Fleur signaled the groom to help her onto the back of the sleek brown mare.

  The three of them rode slowly across the back lawns for almost half an hour, Lady Pamela closely flanked by the duke on one side and Fleur on the other. Gradually the terror faded from the child’s face. She was even flushed with triumph by the time they returned to the stables, and loudly demanded to know whether the groom her father had summoned had seen her.

  “That I did, my lady,” the groom said, lifting her to the ground. “You will be galloping to hounds before we know it.”

  “I want a real horse next time,” she said, looking up to her father.

  “Let Lady Pamela play with her dog for a while, Prewett,” the duke said, “and then escort her to the house and have her taken to her nurse.” He turned to Fleur and nodded his head curtly. “Let’s ride.”

  Her eyes widened. Not even the fact that he was to be her riding companion could spoil the beauty and unexpected wonder of this particular morning. She had ridden very slowly with a child and her father. Now she was to ride free?

  His grace had already turned his horse’s head toward the lawns of the park, which stretched for miles to the south of the house.

  WAS IT ONLY TWO NIGHTS before that he had resolved to stop seeing her? the Duke of Ridgeway wondered, taking his horse to a canter and hearing the mare increase its pace behind him.

  A number of the gentlemen had gone fishing. Most of the ladies were going into Wollaston. He had told Treadwell and Grantsham that he would probably join them in the billiard room after giving his daughter a short riding lesson.

  How foolish of him to have expected to see her arrive at the stables in riding habit and boots. When he had hired her, he had given Houghton instructions to provide her with enough money to buy herself some essential garments. Houghton would have seen to it that there was enough money to do just that. There would have been no extra for riding habits or boots.

  It was hard to adjust his mind to some of the realities of poverty.

  Would he be indulging in this stolen hour, he wondered, if she had not smiled at him? In reality, of course, she had not smiled at him at all, but at the prospect of riding. Clearly she had misunderstood him earlier and assumed that it was her task only to bring Pamela to the stables.

  It was the first time he had seen her smile almost directly at him. And it had been a total smile, lighting up her face, making of its beauty a dazzling thing. He could have sworn that all the rays of the sun had been directed at her face when she had lifted it to the sky, even though the clouds had still been low and heavy.

  He had been dazzled pure and simple. And if she loved riding so much, he had decided while they had led Pamela slowly about a back lawn between them, then he would take her riding.

  He glanced back over his shoulder and saw that she was not at all perturbed by the pace he had set. She was obviously a woman bred to the saddle. He spurred Hannibal into a full gallop.

  Sybil hated riding. She preferred to be conveyed from place to place, she always said, in safety.

  He usually did his riding alone.

  She drew level with him, and he realized in a flash of surprised pleasure that she was racing him. She tossed him that dazzling smile again—and this time it was directly at him that she smiled. He took up the challenge.

  They raced recklessly across the smooth miles of the park. Her mare was no match for Hannibal, of course, but sometimes he allowed her to draw level with him and nose ahead before surging into the lead again. She knew his game very well but would not give in to defeat. She was laughing.

  He veered off to his left suddenly, heading directly for the ivy-draped wall that divided this southern end of the park from a pasture. Yes, there it was—the gate. It was a dangerous game. He knew it even as he committed both his own horse and hers to it. But he was in the reckless throes of a race.

  He eased back on Hannibal’s reins as soon as he had cleared the gate and watched the mare soar over with a clear foot to spare, Fleur bent low over its neck. She was no longer laughing as she slowed the mare with expert hands and brought it alongside Hannibal, leaning forward to pat its neck. But her face was glowing with a beauty and an animation that had his breath catching in his throat. She wore no bonnet. Most of the pins that had held her hair back in its usual neat knot seemed to have been shed along the way. Her head seemed surrounded by a golden halo.

  “You have gone down to ignominious defeat,” he said. “Admit it.”

  “But you chose my mount,” she said, “and deliberately picked one that is lame in three legs. Admit it.”

  Touché,” he said, laughing. “We must call truce. You have a splendid seat. You have ridden to hounds?”

  “No,” she said. “I always felt too sorry for the fox or the deer. I ride only for pleasure. There is a great deal of open country about Her—” She stopped abruptly. “About the place where I used to live.”

  “Isabella,” he said softly.

  Her eyes flew to his face, and he wished instantly that he could recall the word. It was as if a door had closed across her face. The magic, the insane magic of the past half-hour, was gone.

  “My name is Fleur,” she said.

  “Hamilton? Is that questionable too?” He watched her with narrowed eyes.

  “My name is Fleur,” she said.

  “Since you have only a slight acquaintance with Lord Brocklehurst, then,” he said, “it is understandable that he misremembered your name.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And remarkably surprising that he would use it at all—on such slight acquaintance,” he said.

  Her eyes looked haunted, as they had the night before when he had come upon her at the bridge. And he hated himself and what he was doing to her. Was it any of his business? Even if she had some mysterious past, even if she was living under an assumed name, was it any of his business? She was doing superior work as a governess and seemed to care for Pamela.

  But Isabella? He did not want to think of her as anyone else but Fleur.

  Their horses were walking slowly along beneath the wall, turning with it as it ran parallel to the lake a mile to the north.

  “You know him very well, don’t you?” he said.

  “Scarcely at all,” she said. “I did not even recognize him until he presented himself this morning.”

  “Has he harassed you in the past?” he asked. “Are you afraid of him?”

  “No!”

  “You don’t need to be,” he said. “You are on my property and in my employ and under my protection. If he has harassed you or threatened you, tell me now, Fleur, and he will be gone before nightfall.”

  “I scarcely know him,” she said.

  They had reached another gate in the wall. He leaned out from the back of his horse and unclasped it. He closed it behind them again when they were back inside the park, amongst the trees that extended to the lake on its south side.

  “Have you seen the follies here?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  He pointed them out to her as they rode past, a triumphal arch leading nowhere, a sylvan grotto that had never housed either nymphs or shepherds, a ruined temple.

  “All of them afford a picturesque view of the lake when
you stand close to them,” he said. “Mr. William Kent had a sure eye for effect.”

  As they rode slowly back to the house from the lake, he found himself telling her about Spain and about the army’s crossing over the Pyrenees into the south of France. She was asking him quiet and intelligent questions. He was not sure how the topic had been introduced.

  He was more sorry than he could say that those magic moments had been so brief. He wished he could have curbed his curiosity about her identity and history, or at least put it off until another time.

  For that half-hour he had felt happier and more carefree than he had felt for years. And she had looked more beautiful and more desirable than any woman he had ever known, her face glowing, her untidy red-gold hair framing her face and half-loose down her back. And her looks and her smiles had been all for him.

  No, he thought as they rode into the stableyard and she hastily summoned a groom to lift her to the ground, it was as well that the morning had developed as it had. The situation had been wrong and dangerous. He was being tempted as he had been tempted even at his first sight of her outside the Drury Lane.

  She was Pamela’s governess now, his servant. She was under his protection, as he had told her earlier. It was his duty to protect her from lechery, not to lead the attack himself.

  “I daresay Pamela has enjoyed her brief holiday,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “We must start lessons early this afternoon.” She stood uncertainly, watching him.

  “I have some matters to discuss with my head groom,” he lied. “You may return to the house, Miss Hamilton.”

  “Yes, your grace.” She curtsied and turned to leave.

  He watched her go, wondering if life ever offered happiness in more than very small, very brief doses.

  THE FRENCH LESSON HAD gone very well, as had the history lesson, or rather the history story. When Fleur took the large globe from its shelf for a geography lesson, Lady Pamela wanted to know where India was.

  “My uncle Thomas was there,” she said, and she traced with a finger under Fleur’s guidance the long sea route that her uncle must have taken in order to come home to England.

  “I don’t like my uncle Thomas,” she said candidly.

  “Why not?” Fleur turned the globe so that India was facing them again. “You have met him only once, and you were tired.”

  “He did not really like me,” the child said. “He was laughing at me.”

  “This is probably because he is not used to little girls,” Fleur said. “Some people do not know how to talk to children. They are a little afraid of them.”

  “He said I do not look like Mama,” Lady Pamela said. “He said I was all Papa. I wish I looked like Mama. Everyone loves Mama.”

  “And you think everyone does not love you because you are dark like your papa?” Fleur asked. “I think you are very wrong. Dark looks can be very handsome. Your many-times-great-grandmother was very dark and very beautiful. She reminded me of you when I saw her portrait downstairs a couple of days ago.”

  Dark eyes looked at her critically. “You are just saying that,” Lady Pamela said.

  “Perhaps you should see for yourself, then,” Fleur said. “And perhaps you should start to become acquainted with your papa’s family. They go back for hundreds of years, long before you or Papa was ever thought of.”

  Most of the ladies, including the duchess, were still in Wollaston, Fleur knew. His grace had ridden away with several of the gentlemen to view his farms, though the drizzle had started to fall again an hour before. It would surely be safe to take Lady Pamela down to the long gallery, as his grace wished her to do on occasion.

  They looked first at the Van Dyck portrait of the dark lady who had once been Duchess of Ridgeway, surrounded by her family, including the duke, and by the family dogs.

  “She is lovely,” Pamela said, clinging to Fleur’s hand. “Do I really look like her?”

  “Yes,” Fleur said. “I think you will look very like her when you are grown up.”

  “Why do the men have such funny hair?” the child asked.

  They examined the hair and the beards and the clothes of her ancestors to note how very much fashions had changed over the years. Lady Pamela chuckled when Fleur explained to her that men had used to wear wigs, until quite recent years.

  “And ladies too,” she said. “Your papa’s grandmama would have worn a large wig and powdered it until it was white.”

  They moved along the gallery to look at a Reynolds portrait of a more recent ancestor so that she could prove her point.

  It was an informal lesson without plan or any particular object, but the child was definitely interested, Fleur could see. She must bring her down whenever she knew that they would not be disturbed. She would see to it if she could that Lady Pamela would not grow up with such a poor sense of her family past as she herself had.

  But the child quickly tired of examining old pictures.

  “What is in those cupboards?” she asked, pointing.

  “I believe your papa said that there are some old toys and games there that he and your uncle Thomas used to play with on rainy days,” she said.

  “Like today,” Lady Pamela said, and stooped down to open one of the cupboard doors. She pulled out a spinning top and two skipping ropes. She pushed the top back inside. She had one in the nursery. She picked up one of the ropes and uncoiled it from the heavy wooden handles. “What do you do with these?”

  Fleur felt a little uneasy. She had been permitted to bring Lady Pamela down to see the paintings, but nothing had been expressly said about allowing her to play there. But it was time to end lessons for the day, and the weather would prevent them from going outside again.

  “You skip with them,” she said. “You hold one of the handles in each hand and turn the rope over your head. You have to jump over it when it reaches the ground.”

  “Show me,” Lady Pamela demanded, holding out one of the ropes.

  “Please,” Fleur said automatically.

  “Please, silly,” the child said.

  It took Lady Pamela a while to catch the idea of turning the handles steadily instead of stopping each time she jumped successfully over the rope. But finally she could jump three times in succession before getting the rope tangled about her feet.

  “How can you do it so many times?” she asked Fleur petulantly.

  Fleur laughed. “Practice,” she said. “Just as with the pianoforte.” Though that was ridiculous, she thought, laughing again. She had not skipped rope for perhaps fifteen years.

  “Charming,” a languid voice said from the doorway, so far distant that neither Fleur nor Lady Pamela had heard the doors open. “Two happy children, would you say, Kent? Ah, but no, one of them transforms herself into Miss Hamilton, now that I have my glass to my eye.”

  Fleur could feel her face flaming. Lord Thomas Kent and Sir Philip Shaw were strolling toward them along the gallery, Sir Philip’s quizzing glass to his eye. She rolled up her own skipping rope with hasty fingers.

  “I am skipping,” Lady Pamela announced.

  “So I see.” Lord Thomas regarded them both with laughing eyes and winked at Fleur. “How is my favorite niece today? Can you skip the length of the gallery?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lady Pamela said.

  He took a coin from his pocket and stooped down in front of her. “This is yours if you can,” he said.

  Lady Pamela drew a deep breath and went hurtling off along the gallery, tripping over the rope every few steps. Both gentlemen laughed as they watched her go.

  “I forgot to tell her that she must do it without once coming to grief,” Lord Thomas said, and strolled, laughing, after her.

  “What a charming picture you made,” Sir Philip said to Fleur. “I am sorry in my heart that I spoke as soon as I did. I have not seen such a trim pair of ankles in a long while.”

  Fleur stooped down without replying and put her skipping rope back into the cupboard. She had found the
gentleman decidedly flirtatious when she had danced with him on the evening of the ball. By the time she stood up, Sir Philip was standing before her, one hand against the wall, regarding her with heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Where do you hide away when you are not with the child, my sweet?” he asked. “Upstairs?”

  She smiled briefly and willed Lady Pamela to turn and skip back down the gallery again.

  “You must be lonely up there all alone,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss the side of her neck.

  “Don’t,” she said firmly.

  But the hoped-for interruption came in an unhoped-for way. Two ladies had entered the open doors of the gallery, one of them the duchess.

  “Ah, darling,” she said, stooping down to kiss her daughter as Sir Philip moved off to examine one of the paintings through his glass. “Making friends with Uncle Thomas, are you?”

  “See, Mama?” Lady Pamela held up her coin. “I can skip. I will show you.”

  “Some other time, darling,” her grace said, straightening up. “Miss Hamilton, will you please take my daughter upstairs to her nurse, then await me in my sitting room?”

  “The dragon is incensed, I fear,” Sir Philip muttered without turning from the picture. “She is usually at her worst when she smiles and speaks so sweetly. My most abject apologies, my sweet. I will make it up to you some other time.”

  Fleur walked half the length of the gallery, her chin up, though her eyes were lowered to the floor. She curtsied, took the skipping rope from Lady Pamela’s hands, took one of her hands in hers, and led her from the room.

  “But, Mama,” the child wailed. “I want to show you.”

  “Was it a forbidden romp, Sybil?” Lord Thomas’ laughing voice was saying before Fleur was beyond earshot. “How shocking.”

  FLEUR STOOD QUIETLY INSIDE the door of the duchess’s sitting room for all of half an hour. For some five minutes of that time she could hear coughing in the adjoining dressing room. Finally the door opened and her grace came in. She crossed to a small escritoire without even glancing Fleur’s way and picked up a letter lying there. Fleur stood for another full five minutes while she read it.