by Mary Balogh
When she was five, the child started to use those hours of Nurse’s sleep for her great disobedience. She began to explore the land surrounding her house. It was not a very great disobedience, she told herself, since she never went beyond the boundary of the park. But those stolen hours were always magical. There was something very enticing about breaking the rules and enjoying a sense of freedom and adventure.
One afternoon while she was thus employed, she discovered a co-conspirator. At least, she assumed that was what he was since surely all children were governed by strict rules and there was no sign of either a parent or a nurse with him.
As she was approaching the river that formed the eastern border of the park—a favorite destination of hers because she could lie on her stomach on the bank and watch the fish dart by—she heard a mighty splash and rushed forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of a giant fish leaping in the air.
It was not a fish, however, but a boy, who was climbing out of the water by the time she arrived on the scene, wearing only his drawers. He was white and skinny. He had lots of dark hair, which was plastered to his head and forehead, and eyes that looked black, though they were probably only dark brown.
She recognized him. He was the boy she was strictly forbidden even to look at in church. He was vulgar. But this was not church.
“Oh, dear,” she said, coming to an abrupt halt several feet from the bank and him. “Did you fall in?”
For a moment she thought he looked scared at the sound of her voice, but then his eyes found her and moved boldly over her, and he sneered.
“I dived in,” he said.
And sure enough, when she looked she could see an untidy heap of clothes at the foot of an old tree, which had several broad branches stretching invitingly out over the water.
“Oh,” she said, “how splendid of you! Does your papa know that you are in my papa’s park?”
“It isn’t so your park,” he said rudely and in an accent that was unfamiliar to her ears. It was probably what her father called a vulgar accent. “This is my father’s land.”
It was a pronouncement that made her a little uneasy since, if it was true, then she was being very disobedient indeed. But she knew it was nor true. The river formed the boundary.
“My papa is on this side of the river,” she said, “and your papa is on that side”
“That’s all you know,” he said, setting his hands on his nonexistent hips. “The river is my father’s, and those branches are over the river.”
It was an argument that almost convinced her until she remembered that branches did not exist independently of trees.
“But the tree is on this side,” she pointed out. “And so are you.” He was standing on the bank, indisputably in their park.
“Pooh!” he said. “What are you going to do about it, then? Run telling tales to Papa?”
“My papa is in London,” she said. “But I would not tell him anyway. Are you going to dive in again? Or did you frighten yourself the first time?”
“Pooh!” he said again. “It wasn’t the first time or even the twenty-first. And nothing scares me.”
And he turned, climbed the tree trunk with his bare feet as though he were a particularly nimble monkey, stepped out onto one of the branches, his arms stretched out to the sides, though he still swayed alarmingly, and then jumped, grasping his knees with both arms as he descended.
There was an almighty splash again. One cold drop landed on the little girl’s arm, though she was standing too far back to get soaked.
Fortunately.
“That was very splendid indeed,” she said admiringly after he had shaken his head like a wet dog and then used his skinny arms to haul himself out onto the bank again.
“I bet you couldn’t do it,” he said, sneering.
“I bet I could” she said, stung. “But if I did, I would get my hair wet and Nurse would want to know why. And then she would know that I go exploring in the afternoons while she sleeps, and I would not be able to do it any more.”
The boy had his hands on his hips again.
“You have a nurse.” he said contemptuously.
“I do,” she admitted. “Don’t you?” He rolled his eyes upward.
“I am eight years old,” he said. “I will be going to school in the autumn. I have had a tutor since I was five.”
“I will have a governess when I am six,” she said.
“To teach you painting and embroidery,” he said with undisguised scorn.
“You are the Mason boy,” she said. “And you talk strangely.”
“And you are the Ashton chit,” he said. “And you talk as though you had a plum in your mouth.”
“You are rude and horrid,” she told him. “I don’t think I like you.”
“Should I weep?” he asked her, pulling a silly face.
She poked out her tongue and shook her head from side to side, which was a dreadfully unladylike thing to do, but she had been severely provoked.
“I bet,” he said, “you couldn’t even climb the tree.”
“Well, there you are wrong,” she said, eyeing it with considerable misgiving. But she had her pride even if she if as only five, and she was not going to let this nasty, vulgar boy have the final word.
She strode over to the tree, considered removing her shoes and stockings since the leather of the former might get scuffed and the silk of the latter might acquire holes. But she did not like the thought of her bare feet against the rough bark. She did remove her spencer, though, since it might get in the way, and her bonnet, which might impede her vision. She folded the spencer neatly and set it down on the grass close to the untidy heap of the boy’s garments, and centered her bonnet carefully on top of it.
“Mind you don’t get a crease or a speck of dirt on them,” the boy jeered.
Annabelle turned her head and eyed him severely.
“Did your Mama never teach you manners?” she asked, and she proceeded on her way up the tree without waiting for an answer.
It really was not very difficult at all, except when she glanced downward to see how far she had come. She almost froze with terror, but could not do so because the boy was sure to be watching. She did not look down again, though. She looked steadily upward. And her little taste of disobedience during the afternoons must have made her bold, for she did not stop, as she might have done, beside the branch from which the boy had dived. It was not good enough simply to prove that she dared go as high as he had gone. He had annoyed her. She suspected that he had sneered for two particular reasons: that she was a girl and that she was five years old. And so she continued on her way upward, and when she came to another broad branch, she sat on it and edged outward until she felt rather than saw that she was right over the water.
Which, she sensed, was far, far below.
She had probably never been more frightened in her life. In fact, she was sure of it. Never even half as frightened.
And that horrid boy was down there somewhere all ready to gloat if she started to cry.
“You see?” she called with quavery gaiety and almost fell off the branch when she risked a downward glance to make sure he was still there to observe her triumph. He was standing where she had left him, his hands still on his hips, his head tilted back.
He was grinning.
“Good enough,” he said. “But I bet you can’t get down again,”
She felt the sudden conviction that he was perfectly right.
She laughed and swung her legs. Her dress must have ridden partway up them when she was moving along the branch. She could feel cool air blow against them.
“You have pluck,” he conceded. “I’ll give you that.”
Which was the first grudging approval he had offered her.
Perhaps she liked him just a little bit after all.
“Jumping is the quickest way down,” he called.
The very thought of jumping made her stomach muscles clench convulsively.
She laughed and swung her legs again.<
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“Then Nurse would find out I had been here, and she would tell Mama and Papa, and I would never be able to come again,” she said. “I would never see you again.”
“Now wouldn’t that be a pity?” he said, but when she risked another look down, she could see that he was grinning, not sneering. And he was coming toward the tree and shinning up it, all nimble arms and legs and bare feet.
He stopped at the branch below hers and walked along it, as he had done before, until he was directly below. He tilted back his head and grinned at her yet again.
“We could jump together,” he suggested.
Annabelle was feeling a most inconvenient and almost irresistible urge to use the commode.
“You do not care if I am never allowed to come here to see you again, do you?” she said severely. “Because I am a girl. And because I am five. And because I am the Ashton chit. I am Annabelle.”
He reached up his skinny right hand.
“Reggie,” he said. “And you’re plucks; for a girl, Anna, and one who is little more than a baby at that. Let me help you down.”
It was rash to refuse such an offer. But she had been stung by the accusation of being little more than a baby, though he had not said it with his customary scorn. Besides, she did not know how she would release her tight hold of her branch in order to take his offered hand.
“I do not need help, thank you all the same,” she said.
He grinned yet again, shrugged, turned, and jumped.
Annabelle felt a veritable shower of cold drops on her legs this time. She also felt that she would surely disgrace herself if she did not get to a commode right now or even sooner. But she would die if she did disgrace herself. She would never again be able to steal even the merest glance at him in church.
The boy—Reggie—stretched out on the bank to dry, his hands clasped behind his head, and quite deliberately ignored her.
Annabelle did not afterward know how long it took her to inch her way back along the branch and down the trunk. But it was long enough to make her feel panic lest Nurse be awake and aware that she was not in any of the many places in or close to the house where she might legitimately be.
That panic, in addition to the dreadful fear of falling or disgracing herself in other ways, was not a comfortable feeling, and long before her feet were on blessedly firm ground again Annabelle was silently promising an unidentified being that if she could only get safety home, she would never, never leave it unchaperoned again.
Reggie was leaning nonchalantly against the trunk as she set first one foot and then the other on the ground.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, “if you promise not to tell anyone else.”
“Cross my heart,” she said, doing just that with one forefinger.
“I always dive out of the tree,” he said, “because I am afraid to climb down.”
“No!” she said, thrilled.
“No, not really,” he said, shrugging.
“Oh, yes, you are,” she said. “And I was afraid too. My legs are still shaking.”
She liked his grin. It was a little bit lopsided. His teeth were large and strong-looking, and the front two were ever so slightly crooked.
“So, are you coming again, then?” he asked her.
“I might,” she said as he bent and handed her her spencer. He kept hold of her bonnet until she was ready for it.
“Just so that I know never to come here again,” he added.
“Suit yourself,” she told him. But there was something like a smile in his eyes, and Annabelle laughed out loud.
He laughed back at her.
“We could be friends,” she said. He pulled a face.
“We had better not let anyone know when we go to church,” he said.
“I will not look at you at all,” she said, “because I am not allowed to. But when I do, I shall look like this.”
And she borrowed one of her mother’s haughtiest expressions. Not that her mother used it often, but Annabelle had always admired it and practiced it frequently before the looking glass in the nursery.
“And I shall look at you like this,” Reggie said and let his half-closed eyes move slowly and insolently down her body from her head to her toes.
They snorted and giggled together.
“I have to go,” she said. “Nurse will be missing me.”
And there was a stronger reason than Nurse. She had a hard time not dancing from one foot to the other. She was going to have to stop and squat among the trees as soon as she was out of his sight, even though it would be a dreadfully unladylike thing to do.
“Am I keeping you?” he asked with cool indifference, raising his eyebrows.
She went dashing off for home without retaliating. Reggie, Reggie, Reggie.
The Mason boy.
Her new friend.
Who was all of eight years old and thought she had pluck.
His eyes were brown, not black.
3
“You will thank me for this one day, lad,” Reggie’s father said with hearty good humor as his carriage rocked to a halt outside Havercroft House on Berkeley Square at precisely one minute to two in the afternoon. “Sowing wild oats is one thing, and I paid well enough to educate you in such a way that you were almost bound to sow them just like any other young gentleman. But excessive extravagance is not the way to make or preserve a fortune. The best thing for that is a good and prudent woman, like your mother.”
“And like Lady Annabelle Ashton?” Reggie raised his eyebrows.
“Oh, Bernie,” his mother said—yes, she was with them too for this historic first-ever visit through the front door of an earl’s residence. Reggie feared this was going to be an excruciatingly public offer of marriage. “Lady Annabelle has always been as pretty as any picture, and she and Reginald will make a handsome couple. But are you quite, quite sure about this? How do we know she is not pining for the young man who tried to elope with her? Though it does sound as if he is not worthy of her if he would abandon her without a fight. How do we know that she has any part of her heart left to give our Reginald?”
“She is a fortunate young lady,” Reggie’s father replied, still beaming with genial triumph, “that Reginald is willing to have her. He is good at heart, as we both know, though what has got into him lately, I do not know. It seems rather late in the day for wild oats. Never mind about love, though, Sadie. That will come in time. Not that either of them deserves it, mind you.”
“Willing may not be quite the right word, sir,” Reggie muttered just as the coachman opened the carriage door and set down the steps.
“Oh, I wish, Reginald,” his mother said, “you would not call your father sir, just like a gentleman with no warmth of family affection in his heart.”
“I am sorry, Ma,” Reggie said, smiling apologetically at her. “I’ll call him Da as if I were still an infant, then, shall I?”
“You will always be my little boy,” she said sadly. “I shall weep if you ever start calling me ma’am“
Reggie vaulted out of the carriage and offered his hand to help her down. Then he hugged her tightly.
“Ma,” he said, “why would I do that? If I ever do, you may clip me about the head, not weep.”
She took his fathers arm and looked apprehensively toward the house. She appeared to have shrunk to half her size since they left home, whereas his father seemed to have expanded to twice his. All of his thunderous ill-humor of two days ago had fled without a trace. Reggie took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. This was it, then. A liveried footman, complete with white wig rolled crisply at the sides, was holding open the door of the mansion where Reggie’s doom was to be sealed.
They were soon in pursuit of the stiff back of the Havercroft butler, who led them up a broad, impressive staircase to the drawing room. This, Reggie thought as the butler announced them and stood aside, must be the very depth of degradation for Havercroft. The drawing room, no less, for his enemy the coal merchant and his famil
y!
There were three people in the room, all of them on their feet or in the process of rising. The earl stood before the cold marble fireplace, his feet slightly apart, his hands clasped at his back, his thin face looking haughty and aristocratic and beaked. He looked as if it might have taken wild horses to drag him there, though he was immaculately turned out, as always. The countess was slender and handsome and smiling. It was a gracious smile rather than a warm one, it was true, and therefore perhaps a little condescending, but it was a smile nonetheless.
And then there was Lady Annabelle, who was tricked out for the occasion in white muslin, which almost exactly matched her complexion. Her very blond hair, arranged in elaborate curls about her head and wispy ringlets over her ears, looked almost colorful in comparison. If she had said boo, she might have been mistaken for a ghost and they might all have run screaming from the room. Her face wore no smile, gracious or otherwise. Nor any other expression. She gazed straight ahead at nothing in particular.
Dash it all, she looked as if she had been suffering. As no doubt she had.
The sound of Reggie’s father rubbing his large hands together was loud in the room for a moment after the butler had finished saying his piece and had closed the door behind the visitors. And then the countess moved gracefully in their direction, both her hands extended toward them—or rather, toward his mother, at whom her smile was directed.
“Mrs. Mason,” she said, “I am delighted you have come too. Mothers are excluded all too often from such happy events as this, and really we ought not to be, ought we, since we are the ones who bore and nurtured our children.”
“Exactly what I always say,” Reggie’s mother said, beaming happily as she set her hands in those of the countess and visibly relaxed. “It is even worse when the child is a son, Lady Havercroft. A man always thinks a son is his, just as if he appeared from nowhere one day and a woman just happened to be hovering in the next room waiting to provide milk and be called Ma and otherwise be ignored. I insisted on coming today. ‘Bernie,’ I said when I knew he and Reginald were coming, ‘I am going too and there is no point in trying to stop me.’”